Unadulterated Obsession
by Straightjacketed
Summary: Elphaba tries to face up to her responsibilities to Nessarose while still trying to carry on with her rebellion against the Wizard. In the process, she is forced to confront the depths of Nessa's obsessions and discover just how deep the well of madness goes - for herself and her sister.
1. Guilt

A/N: Another brief interlude from a major _Wicked_ fanfic, ladies and gents. And like One Mistake Too Many before it, there's a focus on Boq. I hate to say it, but this might well be One Mistake Too Many done by an older, wiser author; as much as I loved working on it, I freely acknowledge that the story was rushed and not entirely thought out. Hopefully, this'll be a bit less slapdash - but you'll have to be the judge. Anyway, feel free to review and critique in detail: read, review and above all, enjoy!

Disclaimer: _Wicked_ doesn't belong to me, nor does Oz. Trust me.

* * *

How had it all gone so horribly wrong?

Elphaba replayed the events of the day in her head, trying to determine the exact moment where things had spiralled out of control. It was futile, of course: everything that could have gone wrong _had_ gone wrong, and no amount of navel-gazing was going to change that. She needed to think clearly and focus on solving the problem at hand… but every time she tried to focus her thoughts in the right direction, she kept drifting back to thoughts of what had gone wrong.

It should have been _good_ day, a day of reunions and reparations. If nothing else, it should have been a day without blood on her hands and the smell of gunpowder in the air; a day without the Wizard, without being hunted, without her failed rebellion, without any of the many things that had defined her life over the last couple of years.

And the hell of it was, it had started off _so positively._ She'd helped Nessa, hadn't she? Elphaba had given her the power to walk at long last – as she should have done years ago. She'd seen Nessarose take her first tentative steps out of the wheelchair, seen the hope in her eyes give way to joy, and watched her celebrate finally achieving her dream… and maybe, just maybe, she'd made some headway to forgiving Elphaba for neglecting her. And then she'd called for Boq, eager to share the news with her favourite manservant.

But Boq was nowhere to be found.

While Elphaba had been enchanting Nessa's slippers, Boq had been making good on his latest escape attempt. This in itself was nothing new, as Nessa herself later admitted: with her reputation having sunken to abyssopelagic depths, servants had been fleeing the governor's manor in droves over the last few months. True, the new restrictions on travel and employment for Munchkins meant that most didn't get far before being arrested, but apparently they thought spending a few months in prison was better than spending them employed by "The Wicked Witch of the East." Boq was the major exception to this: he'd tried to escape at least three times and had been caught on every single occasion – but under Nessa's strict instructions, he was to be spared the usual round of fines and incarcerations, and sent right back to the manor.

This time, though, things were different: with almost no servants left in the manor, nobody saw the Munchkin butler sprinting down the road and nobody raised the alarm… and because the Wizard had declared this day a time of celebration throughout Oz, guard patrols had relaxed for the day – the very reason Elphaba had picked this moment to pay Nessa a visit – meaning that there was nobody to recapture Boq.

Doubly unfortunately, it also meant there was nobody to save him until it was almost too late. By the time Elphaba had taken to the air, the lynch mob had already caught him. She wasn't sure if the crowd had been intending to lure Nessa out, or if they just wanted to take out their frustrations on the hated governor's "favourite," but whatever the case, they'd had their fun with him.

It had been the smoke that had caught Elphaba's attention – a thin column of billowing grey vapour rising from the depths of the forest, accompanied by the smell of roasting meat. Having already beaten the defenceless manservant to a bloody pulp, the mob had decided to go the extra mile by tying him to a tree and setting it alight. Elphaba had descended as quickly as possible, scattering the crowd in all directions with blinding coronas of emerald-green light and ear-splitting thunderclaps; not expecting anything close to resistance, the mob had quickly fled, leaving her to smother the flames and carry the badly-burned Munchkin back to the manor.

Now, Boq was sprawled across the dining room table, unconscious and struggling to breathe. As far as she could tell, he was suffering from smoke inhalation, along with second and third-degree burns across his legs, hands and back, and what hadn't been burned was bruised purple. For good measure, the mob had also left him with a compound fracture on his left arm, a three-inch shard of bone tearing his forearm open.

Now, it was a race to see what would kill Boq first: smoke inhalation, blood loss, or shock.

"What are we going to do, Elphaba?"

It took what little remained of her composure to keep Elphaba from jumping at the sound of Nessa's voice. She'd been so focussed on assessing Boq's injuries, she'd almost forgotten her sister was still in the room with her, but here she was nonetheless – her face streaked with tears, her skin white as chalk, her expression caught somewhere between horror, dread, and bereavement. If Boq was on the threshold of death, then Nessa looked as though she'd already crossed it: she had skipped the moment where she'd have resembled a corpse, and now looked more like a ghost than anything live and tangible.

Elphaba took a deep breath. Focus. She needed to focus… and somehow reassure Nessa at the same time.

"I know of spells that can heal these injuries," she said at last. "But," she added, as Nessa's face lit up, "I'm going to need to be left alone while I'm casting them: this is a very complicated process and I can't afford interruptions."

"But Elphaba-"

"Nessa, I know how much you care for him-"

"I don't _just_ care for him, I _love_ him!" Nessa shrieked, her voice on the edge of hysteria.

"-but I honestly can't have you standing here panicking! I'm sorry, but this is a job that requires silence and perfect concentration."

"But I can help!"

"Have you been teaching yourself magic behind closed doors, then? Do you know how to translate the Grimmerie?"

"No," Nessa admitted, sheepishly. "But you're going to need at least some assistance if you don't want to waste precious time with turning pages or lifting Boq into position. I mean, I could at least fetch and carry if nothing else."

"Look, you don't-"

"Elphaba, _please._ I need to help somehow. I can't just sit out in the corridor and do nothing. It's my fault he's in this mess to begin with: those people hurt him because of me, because I couldn't stop him from running away. I have to at least do _something_ to help him, because he – and everything else that's happened to him – is my responsibility." She took a deep breath, and added, "Just like I was _your_ responsibility. You understand, don't you?"

Elphaba knew exactly how to respond to this: _yes_ , she'd say, _I do understand. But because he's your responsibility, you're going to do the_ responsible _thing and stand aside to let a qualified expert help him. You can make amends later, when he's recovering from all this. Right now_ , _he needs my help and my help alone. He can't afford hesitations, distractions or breakdowns in the middle of the treatment, and that is why you need to leave this to me. Clear?_ And everything would go smoothly from there.

But the words never left her mouth. She couldn't bring herself to say them out loud. Nessa's conclusion had struck a nerve already rasped raw by guilt: she _was_ Elphaba's responsibility – she _should_ have been her responsibility... but Elphaba hadn't been there for her. The moment she'd embarked on her rebellion against the Wizard, she'd abandoned Nessa and left her to suffer through the death of her father, the miserable ascent to governorship, and all the negative press Elphaba's reign of terror had generated. Oh, that hadn't been the start of it, though: she'd been pushing Nessa out of her mind ever since she'd been enrolled at Shiz. From the moment she'd allowed Morrible to separate the two of them, the very _instant_ she'd started entertaining thoughts of becoming the Wizard's grand vizier, she'd been neglecting Nessarose. And for what? A selfish dream that she'd abandoned in favour of a rebellion that had gone nowhere.

This was all her fault.

Even Boq's maiming could be laid at her feet – after all, he wouldn't have faced a lynch mob if it hadn't been for all the bad press Elphaba had left the two of them to deal with.

She should have been there for her; she could have helped Nessa a long time ago, and the only reason she hadn't bothered was because she'd been too wrapped up in her own affairs. She couldn't afford to be so dispassionate – or so neglectful – not anymore. She had to think about the consequences. She had to make amends. She had to…

"You can stay," she said at last.

"Oh, Elphaba, thank you-"

"As long as you keep quiet and follow instructions promptly. Remember, you'll only be helping out with the mundane procedures, but Boq's life depends on them being enacted promptly. So, no panicking, no hesitation, no dramas."

"I understand," said Nessa, smiling through her tears.

"Right then… let's get to work."

* * *

It took just under an hour to save Boq's life.

Together, the two of them cut away the bloodstreaked of his already-scorched clothes, pressed broken bones back into place and reknit them with magic, cleansed the effects of smoke inhalation from his lungs, healed the very worst of the bruises, and erased the burns. Elphaba drew upon everything she could possibly draw upon to ensure that the operation went according to plan: she made use of her raw magical talents, she whispered the potent but dangerous incantations of the Grimmerie, she even brought out the few tattered scraps of lesser spellbooks she'd collected during her travels and put their middling but practical enchantments to work.

Eventually, the last spell was cast, and Boq was stable again: he was still unconscious, and he'd probably be in considerable pain when he finally awoke, but at least he wouldn't be in any danger for the time being.

"What happens now?" Nessa asked.

Elphaba sighed. This was the part she'd secretly been dreading from the moment she'd arrived at the manor. "Well," she began, "I'll stick around to make sure he properly recovers, and then…"

"You're leaving again, aren't you?"

"Nessa, I'm on the run from the authorities. I'm sorry, but the moment people start asking questions about that burnt patch of woodland and the lynch mob start confessing, Munchkinland will be crawling with guardsmen; I can't afford to stay." Something in Nessa's sorrowful gaze pressed an override switch, and Elphaba added, "I really am sorry, Nessa, I never meant to abandon you like I did, I… I lost sight of what I should have been doing, and I-"

"You don't have to apologise."

"I… I'm sorry, what?"

Nessa sighed. "You don't have to apologise to me, Elphaba," she said wearily. "Apologies have pretty much lost all meaning by now: you're sorry you weren't there for me, Boq's sorry whenever he tries to run away, my secretaries are sorry that they have to abandon their posts, Glinda's sorry she doesn't have the time to spare for meetings, my citizens are sorry for Father dying, the rest of Oz is sorry that I've spent most of my life a cripple – _everyone's_ sorry, but nobody feels like doing anything other than spouting the usual hollow platitudes. I just… I just wish somebody would _stay…_ but everyone keeps leaving me. Even Boq tried to leave once or twice before today – and he loves me."

There was an awkward pause.

"I-"

" _He loves me,"_ Nessa repeated, somewhat unnecessarily.

"Then why does he keep trying to leave?"

"I don't know!" she exploded. "Whenever I ask, he mumbles something about wanting to catch up with some friends from Shiz; mainly, he wants to talk with Glinda, but he never explains why."

Elphaba took the deepest breath she could possibly take, counted slowly to ten, and vowed to remain in the manor until Boq regained consciousness, ideally so she could give him a thorough lecture on honesty, realistic expectations, and how to amicably dissolve his "relationship" without someone tying his legs around his head. Glinda had told her of how she'd set the two of them up in the first place, and the results had already been cringeworthy by the time Elphaba had left Shiz; now, though…

She'd known the lovesick Munchkin had never been able to admit the truth to Nessa, but if he'd let the lie build up to such a degree without confessing, then there had to be something seriously wrong with him… unless he _had_ , in which case, there was something seriously wrong with Nessa. Either way, this had to be confronted, and soon.

"Nessa, have you considered the fact that Glinda might have just-"

"No."

"I'm just saying that Boq might be in-"

" _NO."_

Even Elphaba couldn't help but flinch at the volume of Nessa's voice. Evidently, Boq _had_ tried to explain. Still no excuse for lying in the first place, but at least he wasn't as much of a coward as she'd believed. All the same, this was a serious problem: he couldn't afford to hang on to his delusions of wooing Glinda any more than Nessa could hang on to her delusions of wooing him. These two needed to be separated – and soon.

"You can't hang on to him forever, Nessa. You can't stay his employer for the rest of his natural life; I mean, he's got family somewhere, and –"

"No, he doesn't! Why do you think I keep having him brought back here after all the laws he's broken? He wouldn't last half an hour outside these walls, let alone in prison. Out there, he has _no-one._ His family have disowned him, none of the other Munchkins want anything to do with him, and he hasn't been able to job anywhere but here! I mean, you were there when the lynch mob tried to kill him – do _you_ think it's safe for him out there? Do you think I'd have kept him in the manor if it was safe out there? He understands! It's just that he gets lonely from time to time and he wants to meet some of his old friends from Shiz."

It took all of Elphaba's self-control not to groan in exasperation. _Boq didn't_ _ **have**_ _friends at Shiz,_ she wanted to scream. _The nearest equivalents he had were you and Glinda: he didn't even speak to you until Glinda told him to, and as far as Glinda was concerned, he might as well have been invisible. He's not trying to meet up with friends, he's trying to recover the mangled wreckage he's made of his life, which he won't do because he'll never admit that Glinda couldn't give a damn about him. The moment you realize that he doesn't love you, Nessa, the happier you'll be for it._

But once again, the words never reached her lips: the expression of hurt and desperation on Nessa's face had silenced any dissent on Elphaba's part.

"You understand, don't you?" said Nessa, almost pathetically. "I have to keep him close, for his own sake. I can't lose him; I've lost so many people in my life – Father, the few friends I had at Shiz… even you. I just… I just want to protect him. And… I think you know how."

"…what?"

"I'm the Wicked Witch of the East, Elphaba. Don't you think it's time I learned a little magic?"

"First of all, don't even _think_ of calling yourself that. I don't care what they say – you're not wicked. Secondly, this isn't something I can teach you overnight: it took months for me to get my magical powers refined to a practical level, and you don't have my innate powers. This could take years for you to master, Nessa-"

"Then so be it! Do I look like I have anything better to do? I mean, it's not as if I have a social life, is it? More than half of my duties are conducted by mail anyway, and all the ceremonial business has been relegated to lesser officials; as far as I'm concerned, the schedule's open and waiting."

"I'm sorry, but I can't stay here forever, as much as I'd like to. I mean, the guardsmen are going to start sniffing around sooner or later-"

"Then don't fall out of contact!" Nessa exploded, almost sparking with nervous energy. "You've got ways of travelling unseen, haven't you? All you have to do is fly back here every now and again – even if you can't manage a meeting with me, you can still leave letters on my desk. You can tutor me by correspondence, we can plan out the details tonight while we're waiting for Boq to recover! Trust me, the guards aren't going to be here for ages: if someone does sound the alarm, the Wizard's going to be sending his handpicked men from the Emerald City's garrison, not the local bully-boys. You'll be safe, I promise."

Once again, Elphaba wanted to take a deep breath and explain all the reasons why this couldn't possibly work: mid-air stealth wasn't as easy as it sounded, unexplained letters might draw adverse attention from the few servants who hadn't left, magic was far too complicated and dangerous to be taught by a correspondence course, and even if she could stay long enough to hammer out the details of Nessa's tuition, they were still skipping over the root cause of her predicament – treating the symptoms instead of the disease, as it were. She had to be rational about this, to think coldly and calmly and without sentiment…

…but once again, Elphaba found her rational mind was no longer making the decisions: guilt was calling the shots that day.

 _This is your fault, Elphaba,_ said a nasty little voice at the back of her head. _This wouldn't have happened if you'd been there for her. This is your problem, not hers, and it's up to you to solve it. You can do what_ you _want to do and break Nessa's heart all over again… or you can be a sister to her and give her what she wants – what she_ needs. _Don't you think it's time you actually helped someone?_

And in the end, Elphaba could only nod helplessly.

For a time, she stood there, barely conscious of Nessa shrieking with joy and hugging her fiercely around the shoulders, almost oblivious to the Governor of Munchkinland skipping down the hall like a little girl at a fairground. She was distinctly aware that the last few hours of raw emotion and thaumaturgical exhaustion had left her footsore and weary, but she didn't feel like sitting down: she didn't feel like she wanted to be anywhere at this point, because no matter where she ended up, those nagging doubts would find her – and then the guilt would gnaw at her again for daring to even _think_ of reneging.

Meanwhile, her sister was bustling around the manor, now more alive than she'd been in years: she was talking about the meal they'd have that evening; she was telling Elphaba how she'd learned to cook ever since the kitchen staff had started running off; she was collecting pens and paper for the planning session; she was mentioning something about making a bed for Elphaba; she was cocooning Boq in blankets and bundling him into her old wheelchair, readying him for a swift journey back to her bedroom. She was alive, she was vibrant, she was so much _more_ than she once was…

And yet, Elphaba could only stand there, consumed with dread.

Why, now that she was finally doing the right thing, why couldn't she shake the feeling that she'd just made things a thousand time worse?


	2. Desperation

A/N: Welcome back ladies and gentlemen! Quick thanks to reviewers, followers and favouriters before we get with things - I'm glad you like the story so far, Fae'sFlower, and I hope it continues to meet and exceed expectations... though I'm afraid that worrying for the characters might just be the most sensible option at this point. It's going to be a rough journey from hereon.

Anyhow, without further ado, the latest chapter: read, review and above all, enjoy!

Disclaimer: Wicked is one of the many things I will never own, a fact that I have long since accepted.

* * *

The two of them spent the night huddled around a table in Nessa's bedroom, dining on piping-hot bowls of soup as they planned out the tuition, sketching out timetables, resource lists, rules, and all manner of other necessary documents – everything that Nessarose would need to become a proper witch.

Along the way, they also began tentative plans to scale back the restrictions that had further soured Nessa's reputation among the Munchkins, hoping that a more benevolent form of government might at least be able to repair Nessa's reputation. It wasn't much, but at least it might encourage her citizens to look upon her more favourably.

Because leaving spellbooks behind would only draw attention from the few remaining servants when they finally returned to the manor, Elphaba instead offered to commit as much of her knowledge to paper as she could, providing Nessa with a handful of duplicated pages at a time – much more concealable than the paving-stone-sized tomes they'd originally been written in. Nessa herself set the schedule of deliveries: at the end of every week, Elphaba would fly past the house under cover of darkness, hidden under as many obfuscating enchantments as she could muster, and slide an envelope of transcribed spells under Nessa's bedroom window; if Nessa and Boq were alone in the house and none of the servants were due to make another appearance that day, she'd even be allowed in for the evening and given a chance to eat and sleep in comfort.

As nervous as she was about the whole situation, Elphaba had to admit that the chance of getting a hot dinner and a warm bed once a week sounded pretty good. All the same, the idea of leaving so much transcribed magical knowledge hanging around where anyone could read it – or _use_ it – still gave her the shivers. In the end, she had to trust that Nessa could handle the situation intelligently enough to not just leave her spells lying on her desk… and more importantly, she had to trust that Nessa could use that newfound magical power responsibly.

 _After all,_ she mused to nobody in particular, _if you can't trust family, who_ can _you trust?_

 _Yourself, perhaps? Your friends, maybe?_

 _Evidently, my inner monologue has difficulty with rhetorical questions._

In one of the brief lulls in conversation, Elphaba found herself glancing over Nessa's shoulder at the blanket-shrouded figure lying on the bed, almost lost among pillows and plush toys. Judging from those muffled snores, Boq was definitely on the mend, though she couldn't imagine how he'd feel once he awoke: even if he wasn't suffering the usual aches and pains that people in his condition usually experienced, he'd be effectively trapped in the manor with Nessarose for as long as the people of Munchkinland hated him. Not much of a life, but at least he'd be safe.

Maybe it was better this way. If nothing else, it might force the two to be honest with each other – and themselves. Boq might never love Nessa, but with a little time, maybe he could learn to live with her until it was safe for him to leave… assuming, of course, it would _ever_ be safe. But she had to hope that she could at least deflect the blame from Nessa over the following months; she mightn't be able to win a true victory against the Wizard, but she could at least ensure that her sister suffered no further blame.

She had to hope… because under the circumstances, there honestly wasn't much else she could do.

She was still hanging onto that miniscule sliver of hope the next morning, when Elphaba finally bid farewell to Nessa and left via her bedroom window, soaring off into the cold grey sky.

* * *

Months rolled by.

Elphaba's rebellion went on, bloody and thankless and all-too-often futile: for every Animal she released from captivity, two more were silenced, never to speak or think again; for every supporter she gained among the Animals, two more were killed – usually while covering her escape; for every re-education camp she destroyed, two more sprung up within a matter of days.

Her attempts to spread the word of the Wizard's fraudulence to the people all ended in failure: no matter how diplomatic her approach, no matter how reasonable her argument, they simply refused to listen. Some threw stones, some shot at her, but the overwhelming majority of them just ran away, fleeing the Wicked Witch of the West in droves. Sadly, it wasn't so surprising in hindsight: after all, Elphaba was just one voice, easily drowned out by the Wizard's thunderous bellowing, easily dismissed by the jeers of the crowds. And as for the Animals who supported her… well, the popular slogan still proclaimed that Animals should be seen and not heard, and few Ozian citizens paid much attention to their attempts at championing Elphaba's cause.

Time and again, she tried to break into the Wizard's palace, mostly in desperate gambits intended to release the Flying Monkeys from captivity, sometimes in deranged attempts at kidnapping the Wizard. And time and again, she failed: guards stood in readiness at almost every single window and balcony from the ground floor to the uppermost towers, and the few entry points that weren't guarded had been covered with layer after layer of magical wards, courtesy of Madam Morrible. From the looks of things, the palace guard had been on high alert ever since the disaster in Munchkinland – not that they'd been idle before then. In fact, from what little Elphaba could tell, the only point where they'd been lax enough for someone to infiltrate the palace had been during Glinda's great day of celebration, and judging from the current political climate, days like that weren't likely to appear on the calendar again.

So, with the rebellion in shambles and no sign of improvement in sight, Elphaba found herself looking for solace wherever she could find it; and because Glinda and Fiyero were still out of reach, her only consolation lay in her occasional meetings with Nessa.

Once a week, Elphaba would return to Munchkinland in as swift a manner as possible, even teleporting herself across hundreds of miles if need be, and slip an envelope containing that week's lessons under Nessa's window. And on every single visit, she found herself hoping – _praying_ – that Nessa would be there to let her in, not only because it would mean a hot meal and a bed for the evening, but because her sister was one of the few remaining loved ones still within reach.

Nessarose wasn't always waiting for her, but when she was… well, it was the nearest thing Elphaba got to contentedness in those dark days. True, her guilt started gnawing at her for entirely different reasons while she was sequestered at the manor, but for once, the brief moments of happiness she enjoyed there outweighed the depression of her days in the field. There, alone except for Nessa and Boq, she enjoyed a sense of security she hadn't felt in years; she got to spend her evenings in the company of friends that weren't in danger of being murdered or kidnapped… and best of all, Elphaba could pretend that she _wasn't_ leading a failed rebellion and alone in the world except for the few Animals she'd been able to rescue from the camps; for a while, she could pretend she was _normal_.

By her second visit, Boq was in good health again and appeared to have come to terms with his newfound prison sentence, enough to speak on a civil-verging-on-friendly basis with Nessa. Though he didn't seem especially comfortable around Elphaba, he was never anything other than gentlemanly around her – if nothing else, he was courteous enough to tolerate their infrequent chess games on the duller afternoons.

In sharp contrast to the Munchkin's tentative interactions, Nessarose spent their meetings virtually erupting with exuberance: freed from the constraints of her wheelchair, she practically _ricocheted_ around the manor, launching herself up flights of stairs in fits of delirious abandon and sprinting down the corridors at blinding speed, the ruby slippers leaving a glowing trail of scarlet-coloured stardust in her wake. On every single visit, she was bustling around the house, busying herself with five different tasks at once, even taking time off her official duties to help out with the housework that the vastly reduced staff couldn't perform themselves; she was even learning how to dance, as Boq exhaustedly confessed one evening – after having been run ragged across the length of the ballroom.

And most importantly, she was learning magic: given that Elphaba could only transcribe and post a few spells at a time, Nessa's studies proceeded at an understandably languid pace, but she _was_ making progress nonetheless. By their third meeting, she'd gotten the hang of actually casting spells by incantation and gesture, and was already capable of conjuring mystical light; by their fifth meeting (perhaps a month later), she'd progressed to basic telekinetic motion, and though she couldn't lift anything heavier than the marble paperweight on her desk, she was definitely growing stronger with every lesson.

With Boq's protection still on her mind, it wasn't long before she requested special lessons in healing magic, and Elphaba found herself watching with something akin to pride as her little sister swiftly graduated from banishing bruises to sealing cuts and puncture wounds. On one especially joyous meeting, she even greeted Elphaba by healing a gash on her hand left by one of the Wizard's more insistent hunters, even performing effortless diagnostic spells on the fly as she arranged cushions and icepacks for Elphaba's burned shoulder.

Of course, the lessons weren't always so productive. More than once, Elphaba had to extinguish the drapes after Nessa accidentally ignited them, and attempts at trying to ward the house against intrusion only resulted in the drawing room windows being permanently sealed shut. Advanced incantations proved to be something of a weak spot in her early days, for though she could easily command magic with gestures of the hands and fingers, spoken spells often ended in embarrassing miscasts: after one particularly memorable failure, Boq had to spend a rather problematic afternoon hastily burying the multilegged corpse of his bedside table in the garden, prompting Nessa to put any further lessons in transfiguration on hold for the time being.

 _Just as well,_ Elphaba mused, as Boq pummelled the struggling piece of furniture to death with a shovel for the second time in a row. _I'd hate to think of what'd happen if she'd had a chance to make a start on the Grimmerie's incantations…_

Sadly, the turmoil wasn't restricted to their lessons. By the fourth month of the lessons, the relationship between Nessa and Boq began to fray as cabin fever set in: the friendly conversations slowly dwindled away, along with the dancing, the candlelit dinners, and even the chess games. Often, Boq would vanish into some isolated corner of the house and return ashen-faced, his eyes wet with fresh tears; as the weeks went by and communication broke down further, Nessa often did the same. Though neither of them ever acknowledged the fact that they'd been crying, it wasn't hard to see why: one wanted freedom, the other wanted company, and neither could get it. In the end, it wasn't as if there was anything to be done about the situation, not with Munchkinland still politically tense at present; the most Elphaba could do was encourage them to reconcile and force them to discuss matters in person – before her schedule forced her out of the house all over again.

In the end, things only got worse: by the _sixth_ month, the two of them could swing from amiable to downright venomous over the course of a single evening. They were careful not to let Elphaba see them fighting on the occasions when frustrations boiled over, but she could tell that there was an explosion in the making from the simple fact that they refused to speak to one another until she left the room. Of course, it wasn't as if she couldn't hear the two of them shouting at each other or discern what was being said; besides, even if Nessa had found a way of smothering the sound before it could reach her, the arguments were easy to predict, almost always beginning the same way: Boq, voice ragged with emotion, crying out, " _I'm a prisoner in this house!"_ and Nessa, on the verge of tears, wailing, "I'm not keeping you prisoner, Boq, I'm keeping you safe!"

And there were times when even arguments couldn't suffice, days when the tension in the air between the two of them solidified into something palpable enough to smother any attempt at conversation: mealtimes spent in agonizing silence, magic lessons abruptly faltering whenever Boq entered the room, and an all-too-visible series of attempts by both parties to exile themselves to opposite ends of the house. For a time, Elphaba attempted to mediate – in her own remarkably awkward way – and tried to encourage the two of them to actually talk about their problems rather than bottling them up until they finally exploded, but neither showed any overwhelming interest in listening. Eventually, Nessa took her aside one night and pleaded with her to stop negotiating, insisting that they were "just having a bad month."

She'd almost believed her.

It wasn't until Elphaba succumbed to curiosity and paid a discreet visit to the manor a couple of days ahead of schedule that she realized just how dysfunctional the relationship had gotten. Hovering just above the manor's roof, hidden from sight by layer after layer of obfuscating enchantments, she heard the sounds of a colossal argument raging across the house: Nessa, screaming in rage, demanding explanations from Boq; Boq futilely trying to answer back, quickly lapsing into panicked mumbling and desperate, whimpered apologies; the sound of a china plate shattering against the wall, accompanied by a startled yelp from Boq; Nessa's voice, louder and angrier than Elphaba had ever heard, screaming that Glinda would never love him and would never care about Boq the way _she_ did; another musical explosion of crockery and glass, and another, and another.

No less shocking was the apparent resolution: after the argument had run its course and Boq had fled the room in terror, Nessa hurried after him, frantically pleading with him not to leave, insisting that she hadn't meant what she'd just said, that she'd just gotten carried away. After about five nerve-wracking minutes of pleading and cajoling and promising the Munchkin that things would be better from now on, she eventually managed to convince him that it wasn't safe "out there," slowly luring him away from the front door and into her arms.

They were still cleaning up the mess when Elphaba arrived to confront her. Nessa had nothing but apologies and excuses to offer, claiming that she'd had a few too many drinks that evening and had gotten a little upset with Boq's habit of "pining for Glinda." Admittedly, there were quite a few bottles missing from the wine cellar, but any attempts to dig deeper than that were met with terrified silence: Boq was too scared to disagree with Nessa's explanations, and immediately blamed himself when Elphaba started asking questions about how the trouble had started.

Worst of all was the simple fact that, after all the investigations, all the stern warnings and reparations and fence-mending and amateur counselling, there was precious little Elphaba could do about the events of the evening. Talking things out over the course of a few hours wasn't going to change a thing; but as Nessa herself pointed out, letting Boq leave the building would be nothing short of a death sentence with public opinion of Nessarose and her "favourite" as low as it was; and it wasn't as if Elphaba could stay there indefinitely to try and work things out in the long term – as much as she'd have liked to. Time and again, she had to weigh her commitments to friends and family over her duty to defend the Animals of Oz, and with the latter in more immediate danger, she had to hope that Nessa would be sane enough to listen to the advice she'd been given that evening.

 _Yes,_ said a bilious voice in the back of her mind, _you_ _ **have**_ _to hope. Because you've failed as a revolutionary and you've failed as a sister; soon, you'll fail as a witch, and you'll fail as a human being. Soon, hope will be all you have left… and hope fades so very, very, very easily._

In the end, Elphaba could only do her best to ignore the voice of her own self-loathing and carry on with the schedule – six days a week spent on bloodshed and desperation and so many failed attempts to save lives, with the remaining twenty-four hours spent on family, magical tuition, and trying to patch the holes in an increasingly tenuous relationship.

Months fell from the calendar. Hundreds of Animals all over Oz suffered and lapsed into silence; thousands more simply died in captivity. Elphaba endured everything that the Wizard could throw at her, from demoralizing speeches to massed gunfire; once in an azure-blue moon, some misguided outcast would take her in out of sympathy to her cause, and would have to suffer terribly for it. Back in Munchkinland, Nessarose slowly made her way through the improvised magic lessons, progressing from the junior textbooks to the intermediary studies, occasionally demonstrating her skills when Elphaba returned to the manor with broken bones; Boq fluctuated wildly between near-mechanical efficiency and sobbing fits of neuroses, often freezing in terror whenever Nessa tried to hug him by way of apology for her latest outburst; and Elphaba herself ended each visit lying on a bed in the guest room, wondering how it was possible to fix something that might very well be beyond repair.

So it was that one long and torturous year went by…


	3. Failure

A/N: At long last, Chapter Three! Sorry it's late, ladies and gents; I've been seriously preoccupied with work and anxiety attacks. Hopefully the length and quality can compensate, but as always, you'll have to be the judge. Oh, and I've included just a little bit of sisterly fluff just for you Fae'sFlower - though there will be some angst involved.

Anyway, time's up! Read, review, and above all, enjoy!

Disclaimer: Wicked be never mine in any world or dimension.

* * *

With Munchkinland's governor a virtual recluse and the affairs of state managed exclusively by correspondence, unofficial mail had become something of a rarity at the manor: though she'd done her best to cut down on the restrictions and allow a return to basic rights, the Munchkin citizenry still regarded Nessarose Thropp with a great deal of mistrust and fear, and few outside the official circles would be willing to contact her for any reason – not even for the sake of hate mail. As for letters from elsewhere, communiques from beyond Munchkinland were restricted to the occasional directive from the Wizard, and since Nessa hadn't spoken to anyone from Shiz in the last few years, _social_ mail from outside her constituency was almost non-existent.

As such, it came as something of a shock when a letter from Glinda arrived at the manor during one particularly dull visit; no less shocking was the fact that it was addressed to Elphaba.

The message was short and relatively simple: _meet me at the condemned lecture hall at the southern end of Shiz campus, tomorrow night at 8:30. There's a hole in the roof just above the stage that should make it easy for you to get in without being seen. Burn this message once you're finished readying it, and don't be late._ And beneath that, in more of Glinda's beautifully overdone handwriting, a postscript: _this isn't a trick, Elphie_ , it insisted. _Please believe me – we have to talk or I'll never forgive myself._

"Definitely a trap," Nessa surmised, not even bothering to look up from her work.

Elphaba sighed deeply as the letter quietly disintegrated in her hands. "You've gotten amazingly cynical lately, do you know that?"

"Just following in big sister's footsteps. I mean, I'm already learning magic, so…"

"And sarcasm, too. Speaking of the former, just what _are_ you doing? What is that, anyway?"

By way of an answer, Nessa held up a tiny wooden carving in the shape of a nautilus shell. "It's a returning charm… or at least, it will be once I've finished enchanting it. Right now, it's just some piece of junk I found in the attic. I've been practicing basic teleportation spells just in case I have to leave the grounds: I've already enchanted the living room to serve as a lodestone, so if I ever need to get back to manor in a hurry, I just use the charm. According to the book, it should work no matter how far away I am."

"If by "the book" you mean _Spells of Egress,_ that's typical exaggeration. I wouldn't push it any further than a few thousand miles in the real world, but with any luck that shouldn't be necessary. How's the charm working so far?"

"Slowly; I'm having trouble getting the enchantments to stay put, but I think I'm getting there. You should get one for yourself, Elphaba: it'd save you the journey by broom."

"Not feasible. By broomstick, I can at least see if it's safe for me to enter or not. If I use a returning charm, there's no telling what kind of mess I'm teleporting into."

"And if I used the lodestone enchantment to summon you?"

"Then you'd have no way of telling what important business I'd be teleported _out_ of. Same problem, different angle."

"Oh ye of little faith," said Nessa, a mysterious smile etching itself across her face. "By the way, you're a little eager to get sidetracked. Do you actually want to talk about the letter at some point, or do you just not want to think about the implications?"

Elphaba fought a powerful urge to bang her head against the wall. "What makes you think it could be a trap?" she asked, suspecting that she already knew the answer.

"Look, even if Glinda _did_ write that letter, what would be so important as to require a private conference in some abandoned lecture hall? She's not exactly the savviest of the Wizard's officials, in case you hadn't noticed; no offence to Glinda, but if she's picked up on some serious political news, it's likely that everyone in the country knows it already. And more to the point, if she knows you're visiting me-"

"-then it's likely that everyone in the Wizard's inner retinue knows it, too. But what if that's exactly what she wants to talk to me about? What if she's trying to warn me?"

"Well, if I were her, I'd warn you via the mail instead of wasting precious time by dragging you into a defunct university building for a chat… but that's just me. What are you going to do?"

Elphaba bit her lip.

What choice did she have? Even if it was a trap, she had to at least investigate, just to test the waters and see what lines Wizard's men were willing to cross: they'd sprung traps on her before, most of them clumsy and easily-thwarted, and usually baited with Animal prisoners in an attempt to force a rescue mission. Actually getting Glinda involved didn't seem likely, even for the Wizard: most likely, the letter was a fake and any sign of Glinda herself at the scene would be an illusion cooked up by Madam Morrible. On the other hand, if they really were using Glinda as bait, the Wizard's forces _had_ to be getting desperate if they were going to risk endangering their political darling on a trap for Oz's most wanted.

 _What if they're thinking of hurting her just to bring you out of hiding?_ Elphaba's paranoia hissed and cackled, licking greedily at newly-unearthed fears. _What if they're so desperate to capture you, they're willing to risk political suicide? What if the next thing they send is one of her fingers? You've seen it done before. You've seen what these people will do to Animals – what if they're willing to do the same to your friends?_

 _What if Glinda is going to die and it's all your fault?_

In the end, Elphaba had no choice: she had to investigate – for the sake of her own sanity – or she'd never forgive herself.

* * *

The following evening, Elphaba arrived at the abandoned lecture hall exactly as planned.

Back when she'd still attended Shiz, this place had always been closed for repairs for one reason or another – a smashed window here, a collapsed roof there. With the faculty too stingy to pay for decent reconstruction more often than not, the place quickly became a hangout for students in need of a smoke or a quick nip away from the prying eyes of the teachers. Over the months, it also gained a reputation as a lover's lane of sorts, and even a place for the more crooked professors to exchange test answers for money. Eventually, the local constabulary had the doors barred for good, and the faculty washed their hands of it entirely by having it condemned; of course, unrelenting stinginess ensured that nobody would ever cough up the funds to pay for a demolition crew, leaving the building a permanent eyesore blighting the campus.

As promised, the hole in the roof was waiting for her. A hurried sweep of the perimeter revealed no sign of any guards, and diagnostic spells revealed no armed ambushers lying in wait; the building was deserted except for one single, solitary lifesign waiting in the hall below. Unless Morrible had decided to confront her in a magical duel to the death, this had to be Glinda, and unless there was some kind of silent alarm arranged to summon a team of guardsmen the moment she entered, Elphaba had assume she was safe for the time being.

Gently lowering herself through the hole in the roof, she slowly lowered herself to the ground as smoothly as the broomstick could manage... and as she floated past the cobweb-shrouded rafters and into the rotting depths of the lecture hall, she finally got her first good look at the so-called bait: Glinda, resplendent in her silks and perfumes, unchained and (thank Lurline) unharmed.

On closer examination, however, it was clear that Glinda was almost terrified out of her life: her eyes were wide as saucers and shrouded in dark rings, her forehead beaded with sweat, her skin pale and clammy. And unless Elphaba was deeply mistaken, she'd actually torn her dress while making her way into the building – an unthinkable rarity in Glinda's fashion-obsessed reality.

The moment she saw Elphaba landing in front of her, Glinda lunged forward with a shriek of _"Elphie!"_ and drew her into a crushing hug. "You weren't followed?" she whispered frantically. "You're not hurt or anything, are you? Please, tell me you're okay!"

"I'm fine, Glinda, I'm fine! What about you? Are _you_ hurt?"

"Of course not! Why would I be hurt?"

Elphaba sighed and vowed to find a healthier means of controlling her paranoia. Of course the Wizard wouldn't risk the social backlash of using Glinda as bait – not without having her publically declared a traitor first, at least!

"I've been worrying about you ever since I got the letter," she confessed, gently extracting herself from Glinda's arms. "Now, what's all this about? What couldn't you have forgiven yourself for not telling me, and why couldn't you have explained everything in a letter?"

Glinda took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and visibly attempted to collect herself.

"You need to get out of the country," she said at last.

"What?"

"There's really no other way I can say it, Elphie: you need to leave Oz. It's not safe for you anymore."

"Glinda, I've been running a one-woman revolution against an entire government. What makes you think I've been safe _anywhere_ for the last year or so?"

"This is different!" Glinda exploded, her voice edging dangerously close to hysteria. "The Wizard's preparing for a major push against you and any other rebel Animals still active, and he's mobiliziating just about everyone in Oz in the process: every guardsman, every local security brute, every law-abiding citizen, anyone old enough to hold a gun is being armed to capture or kill you on sight. He's forming a _militia,_ Elphie – witch-hunters! He's even had Morrible cook up a whole batch of magic-detecting talismans and thought-transmitting charms just for them. There won't be anywhere in Oz you can hide this time, not with literatively everyone in the country looking for you, not with Morrible following up every sighting with a toxic rainstorm summoned into the area: you need to get out now, while you still can!"

"How did you find out about this, Glinda?"

"That doesn't matter! You need to get moving and soon: don't wait, don't stop for anything or anyone until you're over the border and as far out of Oz as you can go, _now!_ For all I know, they're already watching the skies."

Elphaba's idealism belatedly flared to life. "But what about the Animals?" she demanded angrily. "I can't just give up on them – they're still being silenced and –"

"Oh for Oz's sake, don't you see? It's too late for them, Elphie! It's too late for anyone but yourself!" Glinda took a deep breath, and added, "And don't even think of going back for Nessarose: that's the first place they'll look for you."

"What?"

"How do you think I knew to send you a letter at the governor's manor? Why do you think I had us meet as far away from Munchkinland as possible? The Wizard already knows you've been visiting Nessa; he figured it out over a month ago, and the only reason why he didn't send the troops in earlier is because he wasn't ready to put the place under martial law. But now, he's sending in a whole garrison of troops to have Nessa arrested for "consortiating with enemies of the state" and he's hoping that you'll show up to rescue her!"

"And how the hell do you know that?"

"Look, I've already told you it doesn't matter-"

 _To_ _ **hell**_ _with heathy paranoia control._

"Of _course_ it matters, Glinda!" Elphaba snapped. "I've just spent the last day and a half terrified that the Wizard was using you as bait or ordering you to set a trap for me or Lurline only knows what else! How do I know that you weren't forced to say this? How do I know you aren't being used as part of another one of the Wizard's grand cons? How did you find out about this?"

"Fiyero told me! He's captain of the guard, so of course he'd be in the loop – and he wanted you to know about it before-"

"And why the hell would he want to tell me about this, especially considering he's been hunting me for the last couple of years-"

"BECAUSE HE'S IN LOVE WITH YOU!" Glinda screamed.

A ringing silence descended on the lecture hall as the echoes slowly died away. Eventually, Elphaba managed to collect her thoughts enough to string together a bemused mumble of "I'm sorry, what?"

Glinda took a deep breath, and seemed to sag. "Fiyero is in love with you, Elphaba. He's been in love with you since our last days at Shiz. I mean, why do you think he volunteerified to lead the hunt for you in the first place? He wanted to be reunited with you."

"Did… did he actually tell you this himself, or-"

"Of course he told me," said Glinda, bitterly. "Do you think I'd have figured this out by myself? I'm the _dumb_ one, remember?"

"He told you? He actually told you that he was in love with me? He used those exact words? Seriously, Glinda, I thought he genuinely loved you – you said you were perfect together-"

"But we weren't. We never were, never will be: for every minute he was kissing me, with every single word of that marriage proposal… he was thinking of _you._ And that was back when he could still bear to be in the same room as me. When he wasn't out looking for you, he was waiting to be deployated again, getting less and less interested in me until we just stopped speaking to each other unless we absolutely had to." In spite of herself, Glinda smiled. "But it's okay, really," she said brightly. "I've gotten used to the silences by now; the long absences from the apartment, too; I've almost learned to live with the fact that he won't even sleep in the same bed as me anymore. Lurline only knows I tried to pretend nothing was wrong, though. I kept telling myself he was just depressed about all the awful things people were saying about you, that he was going to cheer up just as soon as we found time for the wedding. But now I know for a fact that… the two of us never had a chance." Her smile grew, wide and desperate and utterly mirthless; even if Elphaba hadn't recognized the distinctive tremor in her voice, Glinda's eyes were quite clearly full of tears. "Not that anyone in Oz is ever going to hear about it, of course," she continued. "This marriage is far too important for public morale for us to ever cancel, not with the Wizard banking on the biggest wedding in Ozian history to take people's minds off all the turmoil in Oz. So, I guess we're just going to get married and spend the rest of our lives pretending to love each other, pretending to be happy in public and spending every private hour trying not to scream and pretending and pretending and-"

Glinda's voice stuttered to a halt, and suddenly she was crying. "I'm a horrible person," she sobbed.

"Glinda-"

" _I'm a horrible person!"_

Elphaba put a reassuring hand on Glinda's shoulder. "Look," she began, "Just because Fiyero doesn't… just because you're having problems with your marriage doesn't mean that you're a horrible person, okay? It's-"

"I wanted to turn you in."

"I… _what?"_

"I wanted to turn you in," Glinda repeated tearfully. "The moment Fiyero told me he was in love with you… I was just so angry, I couldn't even speak. I just sat there, staring at him for what felt like hours until he made his excuses and left, begging me to make sure you got the news before the troops left for Munchkinland. I must have been halfway through writing that letter before I even realized what I was doing, and the moment I started actually thinking about things… all I could think of was how much I hated you. Right then, I blamed you for everything that had gone wrong in my life, for Fiyero not loving me, for all those sleepless nights, for _everything;_ I hated you so much _I couldn't even breathe_. And I… once I'd decided where to meet you, the first thought that popped into my head was just how easy it could be to turn the whole thing into an ambush. One word to the Wizard, a telegram to the local garrison, and you'd be under arrest before Fiyero could do anything about it; I didn't think about the betrayal, about what they'd do to you once you were captured, what Fiyero would think of me, what _you_ would think of me – all I could think of was how much I wanted to hurt you. I got about halfway down the hall to the audience chamber before I understood what I was doing."

"But you didn't go through with it, did you? I'm still alive and free, and I haven't seen any guardsmen about, so-"

"That's not the point!" Glinda wailed. "I could have gotten you killed, and _I wanted it that way!_ And that's the worst part: you're my best friend – my _only_ friend – and I wanted to see you jailed or dead and-and-and… oh _gods,_ Elphaba, I'm such a horrible person and I-"

" _No you're not."_

"But-"

At this point, Elphaba wordlessly wrapped her arms around Glinda, drawing her into a tight embrace and abruptly silencing her sobs. "Listen," she said gently, "I know exactly how you feel; we've both got betrayals on our conscience, but the big difference between the two of us is that you only _thought_ about doing it. I actually did it: I abandoned Nessa when I rebelled against the Wizard, left her alone to deal with all the bad publicity I stirred up; they made her a scapegoat while I was out there playing at being a hero, and it almost drove her insane. That's the reason why I've been staying with her: I am trying to make things right between us, but none of this would have happened if I'd been there for her from the very beginning. That's why you're the one with a clear conscience, and I'm not… and that's why I've got to make sure Nessa's safe before I even _think_ of leaving."

"What? No, Elphie, you can't-"

"I _have to._ If something happens to her because of me, then there's no point in getting away: even if I could survive outside of Oz, I wouldn't really be living – not with that on my conscience."

"But there's an entire battalion on its way to Munchkinland right now! What if they catch you?"

"Well, I imagine I'll either be arrested or executed on the spot. Not much I can do about that, realistically speaking. I'll just have to be as quick and stealthy as possible, and hope I'm not too late. After that… I'll do my best to get out of the country."

There was a pause, as Glinda audibly fought off another flood of tears. "This is goodbye, isn't it?" she whimpered. "After this, we're never going to see each other again."

Elphaba nodded, a lump in her throat.

"I just want you to know… I'm so sorry I-"

"Glinda, you've got nothing to be sorry for-"

"-for working for the Wizard, for staying silent, for-"

"It's okay. I've already told you: your conscience is clear, no matter what you think… but…"

"Yes?"

Elphaba bit her lip. "If this really is goodbye," she began hesitantly. "One way or the other… well, this might be a bit much to ask, but-"

"Name it. Whatever it is, I'll do it."

"I can't fix your marriage to Fiyero – that particular kind of magic's beyond me – but I might just be able to give it a purpose for the two of you to bond over. If this wedding is as important as you think it is, then you might be able to use your positions to do some good. People listen to the two of you, Glinda – more than they ever listened to me, at any rate. Maybe, _just maybe,_ if you're careful, you might just be able to do more for the Animals of Oz than I ever could."

Glinda's eyes widened in astonishment. "You want me to replace you?"

"You and Fiyero, if you're up to it. You don't have to do this if you-"

"I'll do it."

"You're sure?"

In spite of herself, Glinda smiled through her tears. "If it's a choice between doing something worthwhile with my life and spending the rest of my days in a loveless marriage, sleeping alone, slowly drinking my way into an early grave, then of course I'm sure. I'll talk to Fiyero about it as soon as he gets back, I promise – on one condition."

"Name it."

"That you don't waste another second talking to me."

And Elphaba couldn't help but smile in return. "Thank you," she whispered.

Then, with a flicker of magic and the faintest whisper of wind, she was gone.

* * *

It took a little over an hour to make her way back to the manor by air, but even that pushed the broom _and_ Elphaba's spellcasting to its very limits; by the time she landed on the front lawn, the broomstick's handle was beginning to smoulder, and the ordeal of phasing through mountainsides and keeping herself invisible while travelling over military thoroughfares had left her on the verge of collapse. It took all her willpower to keep her from toppling over as she sprinted down the garden path towards the manor, and the threat of incoming troops to keep her in motion as she flung the front door open.

"Nessa!" she shouted. "Downstairs, _now!"_

 _Please, don't let me be too late. Please, let her still be here._

And yes, thank Lurline, here she was, sprinting down the stairs with Boq following close behind. "What's wrong?" Nessa asked. "What happened?"

"We're in trouble: the Wizard knows I've been here, there's troops on their way here arrest you, and apparently Oz isn't safe anymore, so we're going to have to resort to something pretty drastic to get you to safety."

"Wait, slow down – there's people on the way to _arrest_ me? And what do you mean, Oz isn't-"

"Nessa, I literally don't have time to repeat myself. I need to get you out of the country as quickly as possible."

"How? There's not enough room for three on that broomstick of yours, and we're not leaving Boq behind."

Elphaba took a deep breath: she'd been brainstorming ideas for the escape plan for the last hour, and this was the only one that seemed remotely feasible given the obstacles in her path. "We're not taking the broom," she said. "We _can't_ take the broom: it's not fast enough, not sheltered enough, and it can't carry everything you're going to need where you're going; from what little I know about the place, the border regions are a pretty harsh place-"

" _The border regions?!"_

"Between Ix and Ev, to be specific. It's isolated and not exactly the most hospitable place in the world, but I guarantee you won't receive any unpleasant visits from the Wizard's men anytime soon – not unless he actually wants a war with two foreign powers at once. Now, I need you to make sure all the doors and windows are locked, chained and barred just in case we get any unwanted visitors while I'm casting the spell, and make sure that neither you nor Boq leave the house before I've finished teleporting it away."

Nessa's eyes widened. "Hang on, "teleporting it away"? "It," meaning the _house?_ You're going to teleport the entire manor to another country?!"

"Well, unless we've got a couple of tents in the attic, this is the only shelter you've got. Plus, I'm pretty certain you've got more than enough non-perishable food in the pantry to keep you going for the next three weeks – long enough for you to get into contact with a border town and barter for something fresh. Water will be hard to come by out there, so keep the reservoir spells ready and on hand. You _have_ been practicing those, right?"

"I… yes, I've been practicing, but… _you're going to teleport the house?"_

Elphaba sighed. "And you and Boq, yes."

"Isn't that extremely dangerous? I mean, from what the textbooks say, attempting a teleport spell without a clear view of the end location is extremely dangerous-"

"So is using the Grimmerie, but these are two risks we'll just have to take at this point. I may not have a crystal ball at present, but I have an up-to-date map of the area-"

"-you know damn well that's no substitute-"

" _For the_ _love of Lurline,_ it's all we've got! Look, just stay calm, okay? You'll be fine. Just make sure all the doors and windows are locked. I'll be outside, casting the spell: it's a Grimmerie incantation, so it's absolutely vital that I'm not disturbed, distracted or interrupted. Just remember – everything's going to be fine."

"Why outside? Why can't you just cast the spell inside, where it's safe from attack? I mean, if you're outdoors when the spell's finished, you'll be left behind-"

"Unavoidable at this point: I need to see that the teleportation's actually working, and I can't very well do that with four walls in the way; plus, if something goes wrong while teleporting, I could fall through the floor and get stuck in the foundations – no second chances after that kind of screw-up. No arguments, _please,_ Nessa," Elphaba hissed urgently. "I'll see if I can meet up with you afterwards, once I've finished my remaining business in Oz, but for now-"

"This is goodbye," Nessa finished. To Elphaba's surprise, she didn't look tearful or even upset anymore; there was fear in her expression, yes, but there was no trace of sorrow on her face. _Maybe she's getting better at keeping her emotions in check in the event of a_ real _crisis,_ she reflected absently.

Out loud, she whispered, "I'm sorry; please believe me when I say that this is the only way."

"I know. Just…" Nessa hesitated, and then flung her arms around her. "Just promise me you'll stay safe."

 _Borderline impossible._

"I promise," Elphaba lied, trying not to feel unbearably guilty as she returned the hug.

* * *

Fortunately, if the manor grounds had one thing in abundance, it was trees: once Elphaba found one dense enough to hide in, she simply floated to the highest of the branches and hid herself among the leaves – and not a moment too soon, as it happened.

Less than a minute after she'd settled in, she heard the faint but all-too distinctive rattle of wheels on gravel from somewhere in the distance, and turned to see a good-sized convoy of covered wagons rumbling down the road towards the manor; even with the procession several hundred feet away, there was no mistaking the distinctive insignia on the side: the Wizard's men were out in force, and at their current speed, they'd be at the gate in about two minutes. Fortunately, the governor's manor had been built in the Bad Old Days of pre-Wizard politics, and its grounds were well-protected by high walls tipped with wrought-iron spines; even though no guards remained to keep the invaders from getting close, it would still take the army some time to get in – enough time to finish casting, with any luck.

Hunching down low in the branches of the tree, Elphaba leafed hurriedly through the pages of the Grimmerie, searching for the exact spell she needed. She knew she was taking an immense risk by using the book's notoriously unpredictable spells, but she couldn't afford to make use of the more pedestrian teleportation spells she'd learned at Shiz, or in the tattered spellbooks she'd unearthed over the course of her time in the wilderness: after all, she wasn't just teleporting herself this time – she was teleporting an entire building and all its contents several hundred miles away. As dangerous as the Grimmerie was, its intricate incantations were the only spells that might be able to carry Nessa and Boq to safety.

The key word being "might."

In the distance, the nearest of the carts ground to a halt, and a squad of guardsmen clambered out of it; moments later, the next cart followed suit, and more guardsmen spilled out of the transports and into position. Slowly but surely, an army was forming. Of course, they weren't the only ones: a subtle glance at the countryside beyond the ground revealed more troops scuttling down the hill towards the perimeter wall, ready to cut off any attempts to escape via the back gate. Both gates were chained, padlocked and barred at this time of night, but any army worth its salt would be able to break through given the time and tools.

Finally, Elphaba found the page she'd been looking for. She allowed herself perhaps a minute to study the spell and its particulars, hastily studying the eye-searing hieroglyphs for any ambiguity. After all, the last time she'd cast this particular spellbook's edition of a levitation spell, she'd ended up giving Chistery wings and spreading the mutation to every other monkey in captivity; ambiguity was to be avoided at all costs.

Taking the deepest breath she'd taken in her entire life, she began to chant the words of the spell, focussing every last atom of her willpower on the manor as she did so; immediately, she felt the first tell-tale pulses of magic rippling out across the grounds, filling the air with the smell of thunderstorms and tiny, semi-visible eddies of energy. Behind her, there was the sound of someone banging at the gate and screaming for attention, but there was nobody in range to answer – or open the door for that matter. The energy was already beginning to gather around the house, each miniscule whirlpool of magical power slowly amassing in larger numbers, like insects forming a swarm; the swarm became a plague, the plague a horde, the horde a solid tidal wave of energy sweeping over the manor, enveloping it, embracing it, permeating it.

Back at the front gate, the guardsmen had already severed the padlock with a pair of bolt cutters, and were slowly hauling the chains free of the handle. That still left the heavy length of timber holding the gate shut, of course, but judging by the sounds of exertion from just beyond the threshold, they'd been prepared for this particular problem. But even as the battering ram was hauled into place, Elphaba was on the second stanza of the incantation, shaping the spell around the manor and slowly reaching out towards its eventual destination, carefully visualizing the location on the map she'd memorized on the way over. And as she watched, the house itself began to fade in and out of view, and judging by the fact that Nessa and Boq weren't visible through the suddenly translucent building, the spell was affecting them too. Bit by bit, the manor and all its contents were slowly ceasing to exist in Muchkinland and starting to exist _elsewhere._

Judging by the angry shouts from behind her, the guardsmen had noticed the magic at work, and were already shouting at their sappers to force the gate open as quickly as possible. Soon after, a thunderous series of metallic thuds filled the air, as if some massive piston was repeatedly hammering at the gates, slowly battering its way through the fortifications. By now, the army had almost completely surrounded the wall, and many of their number were scaling the dense brickwork and iron spines with ladders, with grapnels, and even siege engines improvised from the wagons that had brought them here. All of them wanted the Wicked Witch of the East under arrest, and the sight of the house slowly fading away only galvanized them into climbing faster – or hammering harder, for from the front entrance, there came the sound of the entire gate being ripped off its hinges, the mechanized battering ram tearing clean through the long-neglected metalwork long before the beam gave way. As the gate clattered to the ground with an ear-shredding shriek of tortured metal, the guardsmen immediately charged in, immediately joined by the handful of men who'd already made it over the wall as they sprinted down the garden path towards the manor – but by then, they were already too late.

As the last words of the spell left Elphaba's lips, the house flickered in and out of corporeal reality one last time and then disappeared entirely: the manor, the greenhouse, the conservatory, even the semidetached servant's quarters vanished into nothingness, leaving only the hopelessly overgrown gardens and the abandoned groundskeeper's hut. A moment later, a massive pile of stone materialized where the governor's manor had once been, a mountain of limestone towering over the surrounding landscape; for some reason, a large swarm of bats also appeared on the scene, immediately scattering in alarm as they noticed the sudden change in scenery.

 _Oh right,_ Elphaba mused, as a platoon of angry guardsmen sprinted past her hiding place. _It's a reciprocal exchange teleportation spell: I sent the manor there, and now I get something of similar size and weight back. Fair enough… but why have I gotten_ limestone? _I'm pretty sure the borderlands were desert last I'd looked._

She shook her head, and resolved to deal with the problem later once she was safely out of the compound. Of course, she couldn't very well take off from the tree, not with so many rifles waiting to shoot her down. At present, the manor grounds were _crawling_ with guardsmen, all of them either making their way over the wall or investigating the pile of rock that had replaced their target – as if hoping that they might find Nessa hiding under it. On the upside, none of them appeared to have the slightest clue what to do next, the officers least of all; best of all, most of the army appeared to be _inside_ the wall, with only a skeleton crew of drivers left beyond. So, tucking the Grimmerie under one arm and her broomstick under the other, she concentrated all her will on a tiny point just beyond the gate, and-

 _Teleported._

Immediately, she regretted it: teleporting objects and people was exhausting enough, but teleporting _herself_ was easily the roughest form of transportation in her current repertoire, even though she'd only travelled about fifty yards; putting aside the usual risks of accidentally materializing inside a wall or merging with the ground, it was so draining that it often wasn't worth the effort except in emergencies. Opening her eyes, she found that she'd arrived intact on the other side of the gate, but now her head was pounding so violently that Elphaba had to brace herself against the wall or risk collapsing altogether. If the ride over had fatigued her, the last couple of teleportation spells had stopped just short of knocking her unconscious.

Yawning furiously, she bit down hard on her right knuckle, forcing herself to stay awake. She just needed to stay awake for a little longer, just long enough to get to safety – easy enough now that the riflemen were out of range; a few miles from here, the countryside gave way to forest. If she could just find a spot where the local hunters weren't likely to find her, she could rest, plan, and-

"Elphaba!" hissed a voice.

Elphaba spun around just in time to see a green-uniformed figure step out from behind one of the nearest wagons; instinctively, she readied a blast of magic (not knowing if she was to kill or simply stun the guardsman, not even knowing if she had the energy to cast even the simplest of combat spells), but then she got a good look at the man's face and immediately relaxed.

"What the hell are you doing here, Fiyero?" she whispered.

"I'm here on official duties, of course," Fiyero replied. "What the hell are _you_ doing here? You're supposed to be out of the country by now. Didn't Glinda warn you not to come back?"

"Of course she warned me! Are you really surprised that I didn't listen?"

Fiyero sighed deeply. "In a word, no. Still, you managed to save Nessa, so that's a plus." He glanced over her shoulder. "But we can't stand around chatting while we've got half a garrison out there: you need to get going, and fast."

"I'm intending to. Is the coast clear?"

"Definitely not. They're expecting you to make an appearance at any moment: I think command assigned a sharpshooter to remain behind with just about every single wagon parked here, so if you take off now, there's no telling if you'll be able to get out of range before they shoot you."

"Alright then, so flying's out. Any ideas?"

Fiyero thought for a moment, eyes frantically scanning the surrounding area for returning guardsman. "I'll get you out of here," he said at last. "My wagon's clear of troops. If I can hide you in the back, I should be able to get you as far as Verdant Verge before anyone starts asking questions."

"But if they catch you-"

"We'll just have to risk it; besides, it's either risk capture or risk getting shot. Now, come on, let's go…"

As the two of them shuffled awkwardly towards the nearest wagon, careful to keep the bulk of the wall between them and the guardsmen back in the compound, a thought abruptly struck Elphaba, and she voiced it almost without thinking: "This might be the wrong time to ask, but Glinda said you were in love with me. Is that true?"

To his credit, Fiyero didn't stop moving: instead, he took a deep breath and groaned wearily. "She told you everything, didn't she?"

"In a word, yes. But that's not important right now."

"And discussing our relationship is?"

"Fiyero, I'm on the verge of passing out: I need to concentrate on something other than the horizon, or you'll be carrying me to the wagon, and as long as there aren't any guardsmen to overhear us, talking might be the only thing that works. Now, are you in love with me or not?"

"I… I mean… well… I never meant to break Glinda's heart, Elphaba-"

"-I should damn well hope so-"

"-And I know I should have mentioned this a long time ago, but…" Fiyero closed his eyes, as if bracing himself for the worst. "Yes. I love you. I've loved you ever since we were at Shiz – from the day we saved the lion cub, in fact. And yes, that's why I've been leading the hunt for you. No, I didn't really have a plan for what to do once I found you. Yes, I know that by explaining it to Glinda I ended up breaking her heart-"

"Fiyero…"

"And yes, by having her send that letter, I knew I'd never get to see you again, but Oz is going in a very unpleasant direction, and I don't want to imagine what'd happen to you with the way things are going. True, I know that the Wizard want you alive and the guardsman won't even consider killing you, but I'd rather not learn what they're planning to do to you if they ever manage to capture you intact."

He paused for breath. "In short, I'm in love with you."

"And you want to know if I feel the same way, don't you?"

"Time and place, Elphaba, time and place… but I wouldn't mind knowing."

Elphaba hesitated. "I had a crush on you when were at Shiz, if you can believe it," she admitted. "I never acted on it, though. I always thought you were in love with Glinda, and… well, I honestly never thought you'd even look twice in my direction except to gawk. At the time, the idea just didn't occur to me, but…" She bit her lip: suddenly, speech seemed very difficult.

"Elphaba?"

"Yes," she answered at last. "I love you."

"You're willing to admit that even though we're never going to see each other again?"

In spite of herself, Elphaba smiled. "Some things shouldn't be left unsaid," she whispered – voice low so Fiyero couldn't hear the tremor in her voice. "Besides, I've already had to say goodbye to my oldest friend, my childhood home _and_ my little sister. Why not say goodbye to a budding romance as well?" She took a deep, shuddering breath. "Just… promise me you won't abandon Glinda once this is over, okay?"

Fiyero returned the smile, as they rounded the corner of the nearest wagon. "I swear on my mother's grave," he said solemnly.

"Or your own, perhaps," said a cold voice.

There was an agonizing pause as the two of them slowly turned in the direction of the voice: sitting in the back of the wagon was an officer of the guard, pale eyes aglitter and sharp-featured face contorted in a smug grin. He was levelling a revolver at Elphaba's face; the two guardsmen flanking him, on the other hand, were both armed with rifles… and judging by the sound of booted feet clomping to a halt behind them, so were the reinforcements.

"I thought you said your wagon was empty," Elphaba whispered furiously, as the guardsmen slowly closed in on them.

"So did I. Apparently, someone's been going over my head about troop deployment."

"What do we do?"

"Easy: bluff." And with that, Fiyero offered his best winning smile. "Thank goodness you're here, lieutenant!" he said loudly. "I was trying to sweet-talk the Witch into surrendering, but I haven't been having much luck; I'd only just managed to get close enough to handcuff her." He coughed explosively, adding "play along, Elphaba" under his breath.

 _Oh dear god, of all the skills I could possibly need right now, why "acting?"_

"Erm. Damn you, Captain Tiggular," she said, even louder than Fiyero. "I trusted you and you betrayed me!"

The lieutenant rolled his eyes. "You can drop the act, lovebirds," he said icily. "We already know your little secret."

"…You do?"

"We knew it from the moment your fiancée started sending messages to Nessarose Thropp via private courier. Seriously, you thought correspondence with a known associate of the Wicked Witch wouldn't draw attention? And what about Glinda Upland suddenly cancelling all her appointments just to spend her afternoon in some disused university building? Madame Morrible was watching every second of that little meeting by scrying crystal." The lieutenant's smirk grew. "Glinda's already under arrest, 'captain'. Your family's been placed in protective custody, your ancestral title's been revoked, your assets have been frozen pending a full investigation, and… oh yes, you've been officially discharged from the Wizard's service. Congratulations. Now, put your hands behind your head and step away from the Witch."

"This is ridiculous!" Fiyero shouted. "All this is hearsay and nothing more, and besides, you don't have the authority to arrest me! You probably don't even have a warrant, do y-"

"We do, in fact. I was intending to have you arrested _after_ we arrested Governor Nessarose, but with that opportunity scuppered, you've done me the unexpected favour of dragging the Wicked Witch of the West into all this. Now, hands up. You too," the lieutenant added, glaring down at Elphaba.

"And just what makes you think I'm going to surrender?" Elphaba snarled. "I already know you're not going to kill me, not when the Wizard wants me alive."

The lieutenant smirked, wider and more revolting than ever: it was a smug and hateful-looking smirk, a mirthless upturning of the lips custom-designed to show observers just how far the face could twist itself out of shape in an attempt to look triumphant. It was a smile that begged to be erased with a sledgehammer, or at the very least with an uppercut, but unfortunately there were too many rifles between Elphaba and the smirk's owner; and all bravado aside, she didn't know if she had the energy to cast a single spell without passing out – and that was assuming the other troops didn't shoot her before she finished casting.

"You know something, Miss Thropp?" he said gleefully. "You're absolutely right."

And without missing a beat, he raised the revolver. Two deafening gunshots rang out, instantly hammering Elphaba's eardrums so violently that for ten agonizing seconds she was deaf to anything but the reverberations. Then, she realized that the lieutenant hadn't been aiming at her: trembling, she turned to see Fiyero looking down in shock and horror at the gaping wounds torn in his knees; as blood slowly trickled down his legs and dyed his uniform trousers dark crimson, he tottered, swayed and finally crashed to the dirt.

"There," said the lieutenant. "Isn't that better? Now you have a reason to surrender after all."

"You _bastard!"_ Elphaba roared. "You _monster!_ If he dies, I swear I'll-"

"None of that, thank you. Fiyero Tiggular's life is in your hands, Miss Thropp: misbehave now, and you'll see just how much suffering a human being can endure before he dies. He's still got a chance, provided he gets to a hospital and doesn't intercept any more bullets on the way, but that all depends on you following orders. So tell me, what matters more to you: your freedom, or this man's life?"

Elphaba looked from the assembled guardsmen to Fiyero's supine form, now contorted in agony as he struggled to get a grip on the path. "Where are my legs?" he mumbled deliriously. "Elphaba, what's happened to my legs?"

"Crying shame when you think about it: he was _such_ a good dancer." That mocking little smirk again. "I'd hurry if I were you, Miss Thropp. He might just be going into shock."

Elphaba blinked back tears, and let out a sound that started as a snarl and ended as a whimper. "What do you want?" she asked, helplessly.

"Drop the broomstick and put the Grimmerie on the ground, now."

Without hesitating, she let the broom fall from her arms, before calmly placing the priceless spellbook on ground in front of her.

"Now empty your pockets – nice and slowly, now. Any sudden moves, and your lover will feel it."

Sighing, Elphaba reached into the pockets of her robe, and began wearily ladelling out handfuls of magical paraphernalia: wands, magical pendants, spell notebooks, runic talismans, vials of herbs, totemic bone shards, enchanted rings, folded maps, and so many empty inkwells and ruined pens. Even her little green bottle was forced out of her pockets, joining the rest of her belongings in a massive heap for the surrounding guardsmen to confiscate.

"That's all?" the lieutenant asked.

"That's everything."

"See that it is: if you're lying, Fiyero dies."

"I'm telling you my pockets are officially empty." By way of explanation, Elphaba patted her pockets. "See? Nothing here, nothing here, nothi-"

Her hand stopped right above her back pocket: there was something in there – impossible, given that she hadn't actually used the damn thing since she'd first started adding compartments to her robes; but there it was nonetheless, a tiny wooden carving tucked into a corner of her back pocket. A tiny wooden carving in the shape of-

Elphaba's eyes widened.

A nautilus shell.

And unless she was horribly wrong, it was already starting to crackle with magical energy, the first inklings of a ten-second countdown to a spell of teleportation.

"Oh no, no, no, no, not _now…"_

Elphaba tried to grab the returning charm, to fling it out of her pocket before the spell was finished, but someone among the guardsmen must have seen her, because immediately the air was split with the clatter of rifles being primed to fire.

"What are you doing?" the lieutenant demanded, immediately suspicious.

"I'm not doing anything!"

"Then get your hand out of that pocket."

"But-"

"Hands out of your pocket or Fiyero Tiggular dies here and now. Your choice, Witch."

 _Five seconds._

Elphaba looked down at Fiyero, her mind suddenly alight with visions of what they'd do to him if the charm was allowed to finish its work. Then, at last, she let her hand slump to her side, empty. There was a way out of this for both of them, she realized, but she'd have to move quickly – and hope that the returning charm was strong enough to carry two people at the most.

 _Four._

"Was that so hard?" the lieutenant sneered.

 _Three._

"Now, on your knees."

 _Two._

Elphaba smiled, nodded… and _lunged,_ diving for Fiyero with all the force she could muster, hoping against hope that she could get close enough to grab him before the spell was finished.

 _One._

And then one of the guardsmen stepped forward and grabbed her by the collar, hauling her back from Fiyero; it wasn't a tight grip – easy enough to wriggle out of with a good swift kick to the guardsman's crotch – but by the time she was in motion again, it was already too late. The returning charm in her pocket flared brightly, casting a vivid glow on the surrounding guardsmen as the teleportation spell gathered around her, locked her in place, and finally swept over Elphaba in a dazzling maelstrom of multi-coloured energies.

The last thing she saw – before the spell enveloped her and sent her tumbling into the void – was the lieutenant levelling a gun at Fiyero's heart, screaming an order that she couldn't possibly hear over the howl of rampant energies and the screams of panicking guardsmen. Elphaba tried one last time to save Fiyero, to reach out with her own magic and drag him into the spell, but too late – too late to save Fiyero, too late to save Glinda, too late to save _anyone._ No sooner had she been able to focus her willpower, the tidal wave of magic crashed down upon her, enfolding her in its coruscating depths and flinging her headlong out of Oz.

 _Too late,_ she thought despairingly. _Always was, always will be. Too late._

* * *

A small eternity later, Elphaba finally tumbled back into reality, landing with a thud in the softest armchair of the manor's living room.

"It worked!" Nessarose shrieked ecstatically. "My first returning charm _and it worked!"_

Elphaba looked from Nessa to the surrounding room – utterly unchanged since her last visit: evidently, her own teleportation had worked perfectly, for there didn't seem to be a single piece of furniture out of place. Then, she remembered herself and sprang out of her seat.

"When the hell did you put the charm in my pocket?" she snarled furiously.

"What, no 'thank you?'"

"It was when you were hugging me, wasn't it? You snuck the charm into my back pocket and let me go out there with a returning charm just so you could whisk me away whenever you felt like it, am I right? I _said_ I had business in Oz, Nessa-"

"And some of that business involves getting shot, does it?" A smug little grin blossomed on Nessa's face. "Yeah, I probably should have told you I've been practicing scrying in the last couple of months: I had my eye on you the moment you left the building, and as soon as those thugs had their hands on you, I triggered the lodestone to bring you back here. True, it took a little while for the spell to focus on you with God only knows how many hundreds of miles between here and Munchkinland, but it worked!"

"Look-" Elphaba took a deep breath and tried again. "Thank you, Nessa," she said wearily. "I'm grateful for all you did to save my life, and I'm honestly impressed with the progress you've made, but I really, _really_ need to get back out there: Fiyero's and Glinda are in danger, and-"

"I know. Scrying, remember?"

"Then you'll know that Fiyero's already been shot twice and Glinda's been imprisoned. I need to get back there before something terrible happens to them-"

"Not possible."

"Not possible?" Elphaba echoed. "What do you mean 'not possible'? I just teleported this house almost a thousand miles to the north of Munchkinland, and you teleported me right to it despite all the risks of catastrophic failure! Impossible is a relative term at this point."

"Maybe so, but you only succeeded at that because you had the Grimmerie, and that's now in the hands of the Wizard. And you've lost your broom, too. So tell me, how are you planning on getting back to Oz?"

Elphaba let out a ragged growl of mingled frustration and desperation. "I'll think of something!" she erupted. "I'll work with lesser teleportation spells, I'll trade with the locals for a halfway decent horse, I'll see if the old train line from Ix to Gilikin is still running, I'll _walk_ if I have to!"

Nessa smiled, but sadly this time. "Look out the window, Elphaba."

"What?"

"Just look out the window."

Elphaba crossed to the nearest open window and peered through the gloom surrounding the house: it took a while for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, but when they finally did, she realized that she wasn't staring out at barren sand dunes or dry canyons; she was staring at a solid wall of limestone less than fifty feet away from the windowsill, a vast rock formation stretching high above the manor's roof. Glancing left and right, she found more barriers of solid rock surrounding the house, more natural formations caging them in, but it wasn't until she looked up that the obvious finally occurred to her: they were in a cave – one vast enough to contain the entire manor within its colossal depths, but for all that, just a cavern.

"How could this have happened?" she asked softly.

"Lack of specificity, I think: you got the distance correct, but you miscalculated the depth. We're on the Ev/Ix border just as you intended, but we're a good five hundred feet beneath the intended destination. I've already taken a good look around: the nearest thing we have to an exit is a vertical shaft about four hundred feet in length; since you don't have your broom anymore, I'd say we aren't going anywhere in a hurry unless you feel like climbing."

"You mean we're trapped?"

"In a word, yes."

"But I've still got magic of my own! What if I tried blasting my way through the walls, tunnelling a way out-"

"You'd only end up causing a cave-in, I think."

"There has to be _some_ way of getting out! I need to get back to Oz and-"

"I know… but something tells me we won't be going anywhere for a long time. I think it's time you accepted reality, Elphaba: we're stuck here, and there's nothing you can do to help your friends. All we can do is get settled in and count our blessings."

"Oh really?" Elphaba snapped, angry tears burning the corners of her eyes. "And what blessings would those be, exactly? That Fiyero's probably dead by now? That Glinda's going to spend the rest of her life in prison? That everything I did for Animals in Oz came to nothing? That we're trapped five hundred feet underground? What blessings am I supposed to count?!"

Nessa offered that sad little smile again. "We're alive, sister. We've survived the journey out of Oz, and we've found a place where nobody will ever think to look for us or even find us. We have everything we need to sustain ourselves out here, including a functioning greenhouse and magic. And I think… with a little time and little effort, we might just be able to make a new life for ourselves out here."

Elphaba looked blankly at the surrounding rock walls, took a deep breath and made her decision. "I'm not listening to another word of this," she said curtly, and stormed out.

Or least, she would have if the door hadn't slammed shut in her face.

"Open the door, Nessa," Elphaba snarled through gritted teeth, not even bothering to turn around; she wasn't going to give her the satisfaction of making eye contact, not until the door was open and she'd had a moment to dry her eyes.

"Not until you've calmed down."

"This is _not_ a time for negotiation, in case you hadn't noticed. Lives are at stake."

" _Lives you can't save_. They're already dead: accept it and move on."

"How can you possibly-"

"Say such terrible things? Because I care, Elphaba: I'm not going to let you throw your life away pursuing another lost cause. I already lost you once when you ran off to rebel against the Wizard, and I will _not_ lose you again. Besides, what makes you think you'll get anywhere? You're tired, Elphaba: you've almost burned through all your reserves of strength in the last few hours just to save me; you'll be lucky if you can chip the limestone before passing out. You don't need to be a hero anymore, Elphaba, you need rest… and more importantly, you deserve it: you've been running and fighting for so many years, you've forgotten what it means to be at peace. Don't you think you deserve more than a thankless life spent on a country that was never worth your efforts? Don't you deserve rest?" Nessa paused, and added, "Do you think Glinda would want you to make yourself miserable? Do you think _Fiyero_ would want you destroying your life? They knew Oz was beyond saving, Elphaba. That's why they wanted you out of the country, wasn't it? They didn't want to see you fighting a losing battle for the rest of your life: they wanted you to be alive and happy."

"I can't be happy knowing I failed them." Elphaba tried to keep her voice steady, but she was already starting to sniffle. "I can't… I can't let it end like this."

"But it already has. There's nothing you can do: Fiyero, Glinda, the Animals – they're all beyond reach now, all dead or dying. Focus on the people left alive – the people you've changed for the better."

Elphaba tried to disagree, but all that emerged from her mouth was a choked sob.

"You've done so much for me in the last year, Elphaba: you gave me the power to walk, you saved Boq's life, you taught me magic, you were there for me as a friend; you protected me when nobody else would, and you risked everything just to save my life when you could have fled. You've been strong for so many years, Elphaba, and I know you've had to be even stronger just to deal with my lessons: let me be strong for _you_ , now. Let _me_ protect you. I'll make the decisions from now on, and you can spend your days in peace, and I'll care for you just as you've cared for me. Don't you think you've earned that?"

Suddenly, Elphaba was crying – not because of Nessa's words, not because they were trapped underground with gods only knew what might be awaiting them in the future, not because Glinda was in jail and Fiyero was probably dead, not even because everything she'd done in Oz had been a failure, but because she'd reached the limit of her endurance. Everything she'd experienced over the last few years had gathered in a vast reservoir, and now the reservoir had exploded, and there was nothing to do but cry because she was just… so… _tired._ For almost fifteen seconds, she sobbed like a child, louder and even more pathetically than Glinda, before Nessa's arms slowly enveloped her in a soothing hug; then, she could only stand there, shivering plaintively as Nessarose held her in her arms, gently stroking her hair.

"It's okay, Elphaba," she whispered, as she gently eased her into a chair. "It's all going to be so much easier from here on…"

What with all the confusion of her last day in Oz and the heartbreak that had followed her arrival, Elphaba spent the next few hours on autopilot, too tired and too emotionally ragged to think critically. But eventually, after about three hours spent slumped in an armchair, watching vacuously as Nessa busied herself with the enchantments that would sustain their new lifestyle, a troubling question suddenly occurred to Elphaba:

 _Where was Boq?_


	4. Exile

A/N: Those of you who've read the latest chapters of _The Land Of What Might Have Been_ will probably know that I made the mistake of trying to write ahead for a few chapters - only to lose them all when my computer figuratively blew up in my face. As it happens, this chapter was collateral damage. So, lesson learned: more backup, more realism, less crappy computers.

Without further ado, the latest chapter! Feel free to supply me with all the lovely, long, detailed reviews you can compose - positive, negative, constructive criticism, pure flame, theorizing, nitpicks over the typoes that creep in at four in the morning, anything you like. Your critiques and appreciation keep me going, guys!

Read, review, and above all, enjoy!

Disclaimer: _Wicked_ still ain't mine. Obvious, really.

* * *

The first five days of their exile went by in near-total silence.

With so little happening inside the manor, its rooms and corridors retained the same kind of eerie quiet rarely found outside crypts, and the cavern in which the house had materialized seemed almost lifeless except for the occasional whisper of wind echoing along the tunnels. Even the inhabitants of the house itself didn't have much to say over the course of the first seventy-two hours, both being lost in their own private affairs: as she later explained in one of her few talkative moments, Nessarose spent most of her time magically modifying the house and grounds for a long stay in isolation; she insulated the walls against the cold and damp, erected light fixtures around the perimeter, rearranged the plumbing, outfitted the greenhouse with an artificial sun, adjusted the soil to produce crops instead of flowers, and conjured a border of barbed-wire fences just in case there was anything hostile lurking in the caverns.

As for Elphaba, well, she didn't have much to do at all after her initial breakdown: Nessa insisted that she spend as much time as possible recuperating from the stress she'd endured in over the last few weeks, and quietly enforced this little edict by keeping Elphaba indoors and in bed at all times, with every single door and window locked and barred until Nessa returned from her chores outside. But she needn't have bothered, for by that point, Elphaba was so weary in mind and body that she couldn't even muster the energy to manage a halfway decent escape attempt. Once the adrenaline that had sustained her for the previous day wore off, fatigue had descended on her like a leaden shroud as the exhaustion she'd been denying for so long finally caught up with her: with her muscles numb and limp, her mind almost burnt out from emotional distress and her magic stretched to breaking point, she'd been too tired to resist as Nessa gently cocooned her in blankets and hauled her upstairs to the master bedroom.

For five days, she lay in bed, floating in and out consciousness, only rising to attend to the bathroom, only disturbed from her slumber when Nessa arrived with the daily meals. More often than not, the muscles in Elphaba's arms were still too ragged to allow her to hold the cutlery even after Nessa applied a few healing spells to help her ligaments heal faster, so her sister quickly resorted to spoon-feeding her. At first, Elphaba protested this, insisting that she could feed herself like any adult, but after the third time the fork had fallen from her trembling grasp, she reluctantly conceded defeat; by that stage, she was almost too tired to feel humiliation anyway. Besides, once the meal was over, she was asleep again in a matter of minutes.

At night, Nessa once again locked the doors and windows, then magically sealed them, enchanting the house with alarm spells and fortifying the staircase with spellwrought barriers for good measure. Only once she was absolutely certain that the house was well and truly secure did Nessa finally retire for the evening – specifically in the master bed, right next to Elphaba; presumably, she didn't want her sister unattended at night just in case of emergencies. This part Elphaba honestly didn't mind: under the circumstances, she honestly didn't want to be alone – not when the nightmares descended on her.

She hadn't expected to dream, what with the lethargy she experienced in her waking hours, but somehow she did. Unsurprisingly, nightmares were all too common in those first few evenings, and equally unsurprisingly, most of them featured Glinda and Fiyero suffering. In one nightmare after another, she witnessed her friends being imprisoned, interrogated, and tortured for the amusement of their jailers, their bodies contorted in agony as the Wizard's men slowly mangled their flesh beyond all recognition in readiness for the time when they were finally executed. Usually, visions like these were proceeded by long and no-less hideous visions showing the people of Oz turning on the once-beloved celebrities just as they'd turned on Elphaba, their names dragged through the mud in a sickening procession of stentorian public addresses, gloatingly libellous headlines, smug propaganda articles, and carefully-directed rumourmongering – all of it shallow, meaningless pap and ultimately pointless since the Wizard's first edict had not only sealed the "treacherous couple's" fate, but dismissed all dissenting opinions as "wicked falsehoods" and "treasonous slander." Before long, effigies were being burned, angry mobs were gathering, sentences were being pronounced, and Glinda and Fiyero were being executed before a jeering crowd of hate-crazed Ozians.

Dreams like these always ended with Elphaba awakening in a cold sweat, trying and failing to smother her screams, trying vainly not to cry. But Nessa would be there for her when she awoke, comforting her through the aftermath of her nightmares and hugging her until she finally drifted back to sleep. This, more than anything else, kept Elphaba sane in the first five terrible days – not rejuvenating sleep, not hot meals, not warm beds, not the healing spells, not even the sense of her body slowly recovering from the strains and traumas she'd subjected it to over the course of her rebellion, but Nessa's soothing presence beside her. Without her, without these moments of whispered conversation finally breaking the silence of the day, without Nessa reminding Elphaba of the simple fact that she had actually changed one life for the better… well, the terrible silence of their new home and Elphaba's own self-loathing might have eaten her alive.

And yet, just before she drifted off to sleep for the final time, one question always intruded on Elphaba's thoughts:

 _Where was Boq?_

* * *

On the sixth day, Elphaba awoke to find herself fell well-rested and fully conscious for the first time in what felt like centuries. Nessa was still asleep next to her, the enchantments in the walls were still buzzing reassuringly, and though the world outside the house was still submerged in darkness, the clock on the wall informed her that it was just past eight in the morning.

As tempting as it was to stay in bed, a curious sense of restlessness was stirring in her bones, a sense that it was time to get up and _do something_. True, she didn't know what that something was: the cavern walls still surrounded them on all sides, none of the copied spellbooks in the house had teleportation spells powerful enough to get back to Oz, and Elphaba had no idea what to spend her time on other than futile escape attempts… but the sensation refused to abate no matter how many times she told herself there was honestly nothing to do.

In the end, what finally got her out of bed was the curious impression something about the house around her felt _different_ ; maybe it was the warmth in the air replacing the subterranean chill of their new world, maybe it was the sense that she was much higher off the ground than she had been the night before. Whatever the case, no matter how many times she told herself it was just her imagination, it refused to abate… and under the need to assuage her curiosity was the need to answer that other nagging question – to find where Boq had vanished to.

So, quietly slipping out of bed, she donned a dressing gown and crept out of the bedroom on tiptoe so as not to wake up Nessa.

Immediately, she noticed that the corridor outside seemed to have lengthenedsomehow: the substance of the hall itself had _stretched_ , wooden panelling and faded green wallpaper distending and warping out of shape like clay. New doors had been set into the extended walls, and behind them, rooms that had never existed on the house's original blueprints now stood waiting to be furnished. Elphaba was impressed, to say the least: structural-spatial distortion enchantments were tricky to cast and even harder to master, but despite having only being given a few pages of basic space-folding charms, Nessa had managed to perform all this work without accidentally damaging the walls or even waking Elphaba up.

Most of these rooms were empty, but one of them had clearly been set up as something of a thaumaturgical laboratory for Nessa: magical paraphernalia lay scattered from one end of the room to the other, from wands to crudely-made talismans, and every single wall was covered in laboriously-scrawled notes. Closer examination revealed that these were the lessons and transcribed spells Elphaba had been providing Nessa with over the last year, many of them showing signs of extensive copying of their own: obviously, Nessarose was taking precautions just in case an errant spell set the entire room ablaze. However, Elphaba couldn't help noticing that some of these notes clearly hadn't been written by her, and often contained spells that she hadn't included in any of her lessons just yet.

Puzzled, Elphaba turned to leave – and almost walked facefirst into Nessa.

"You're up!" she said, evidently pleased. "I'd have thought you'd be out cold for the rest of the week."

"I think five days was an elegant sufficiency. What have you been up to around here, Nessa? I know you said you needed to make a few extensions to the property, but I wouldn't have thought you needed new rooms on _this_ floor."

Nessa looked somewhat abashed. "I was experimenting with some of the new spells you taught me, and… well, once I started, I found it kind of hard to stop. After a while, I decided I needed these new rooms after all… as you can see." She waved a hand vaguely at the sparsely-furnished laboratory. "I've been planning something like this for weeks: see, I needed someplace to practice magic without the risk of accidentally breaking some priceless heirloom."

"You couldn't have just practiced outside?"

"Too many nosy neighbours beforehand, too many uncertain dangerous now. Besides, I needed an excuse to get all my notes properly sorted for easy reference: I'm not very good at organizing papers the usual way."

"As I discovered the last time father had me correct your arithmetic homework. Now, speaking of notes… that's actually something I meant to ask you: I was just looking at some of these notes and I'm pretty sure that I didn't actually teach you the spells; I don't even remember writing this stuff down."

This time, Nessa couldn't even bring herself to look somewhat abashed: this time, she looked downright embarrassed. "Erm," she said sheepishly. "I… may have been attempting… extracurricular studies."

"Extracurricular studies," Elphaba echoed.

"I've been copying directly from your spellbooks, okay? Every time you came to visit, I've been reading through all the texts you had with you and copying out the spells you haven't taught me yet."

Elphaba's jaw dropped open in astonishment. "You did _what?!"_

"Relax, I didn't copy anything out of the Grimmerie: I made sure it wasn't anything really dangerous."

"Nessa, _you're still learning:_ how the hell do you know exactly what's dangerous and what's not? More to the point, do you remember why I broke up your studies into blocks? It wasn't just to keep you in suspense until the next time I arrived with the newest lesson, it was to keep you from accidentally blowing yourself to pieces! How long have you been doing this?"

"Only the last two months. I'm not that reckless, Elphaba: I thought I was up to the challenge."

"And also up to copying my spellbooks without my consent," Elphaba grumbled sourly.

Nessa sighed, her face immediately sculpted into a doe-eyed look of utter contrition. "I'm sorry, okay? I know it was one step removed from petty theft and I know it was irresponsible of me to practice magic ahead of my grade, but I just wanted to make sure I knew how to handle myself in a crisis. I mean, you know how it got back in Oz towards the end… and I wanted to keep _you_ safe if the Wizard's people ever came for you while you were staying at the manor. You understand, don't you? I mean, I know _you'd_ do anything to help me – you've already done so much for me over the last year or so – and… well, I just wanted to return the favour."

Now it was Elphaba's turn to sigh, this time in exasperation: she was distinctly aware that Nessa was trying to sweet-talk her, but try as she might, she couldn't resist the pleading look in her eyes – not with sisterly obligations clamouring in her ears.

"Alright," she grumbled. "I forgive you. But from now on, we're conducting these lessons one-on-one: as long as I'm stuck here, you're officially no longer learning by correspondence."

"Agreed."

Elphaba took a deep breath, and in that moment, the question that had been left unspoken in the back of her head for the last five days finally voiced herself. "By the way," she said hesitantly, "Where's Boq?"

In that moment, Nessa's face underwent a startling metamorphosis: beforehand, she'd responded to Elphaba's searching questions with little more than mild embarrassment; however, the moment Boq's name was mentioned, Nessa's posture instantly turned rigid and anxious, her already pallid features now a ghostly chalk-white. And this time, the expression on her face was a panic-stricken look of fear, suspicion and (unless Elphaba had read her wrong) covetousness. Then, just as quickly as the mask had slipped, it was back in place and Nessarose was smiling again.

"Oh, he's fine," she laughed. "Still finding his feet in our new neighbourhood, but that's to be expected: he's not quite secure with the idea of sleeping upstairs; he keeps insisting on sleeping on the couch in the drawing room just in case something tries to break in. On the upside, he's been helping me map out the caverns over the last two or three days. I know, I'm just as surprised as you are: he used to get so antsy about staying indoors that I thought he'd be claustrophobic, but no, it turns out he's right at home exploring caves like this. He'll be back within the hour."

Nessarose had never gotten into trouble as a child: quite apart from being raised to be respectable from the moment she was old enough to speak, she was far too adored by Father to be blamed for the few astronomically rare acts of mischief on her part – not when Elphaba was around to serve as the scapegoat. As such, she'd never had cause to lie to a family member, nor did anyone know the usual tells that might have indicated a fib… but in that moment, Elphaba didn't need them: she _knew_ without hesitation that Nessa was lying through her teeth. After all the trouble she'd gone to just to keep the neurotic Munchkin by her side, there was no way in hell that Nessa would ever let Boq out of her sight, let alone give him free reign to explore an uncharted cave network.

"Really?" Elphaba said brightly, doing her best to look credulous and unsuspecting. "Well, let me know when he gets back, okay? I'd like to see if there's a tunnel leading upwards so I can get started on burrowing our way out of here."

"…you _do_ remember what I told you when we first arrived, right?"

"I'm just exploring other eventualities, Nessa. We need something to fall back just in case those sunlights in the greenhouse don't work out."

"Point taken. Just… give me and Boq a little while to find the tunnels least likely to collapse, okay?" Nessa glanced over her shoulder at the grandfather clock sitting outside in the corridor. "I'd better be getting back to work," she said briskly. "I've got an extension to finish. You make yourself comfortable, and I'll have breakfast on the table by nine-thirty."

And with that, she was gone, vanishing down the stairs at a swift march.

Elphaba waited, keeping one eye carefully trained on the clock until she was absolutely certain that Nessa wasn't creeping up the stairs to spy on her through the balustrades. She gave it about three minutes: then, once she was absolutely sure that she wasn't being watched, she sprinted down the corridor as quickly and quietly as she could, checking every single room in the hall for Boq – or any sign that he had been there in the last few days. She didn't know what Nessa was hiding, she didn't have the slightest clue what could have happened to Boq, and she couldn't tell if there was any chance of her getting out of the cave network at all – let alone in time to save Fiyero and Glinda; all she knew was that asking her sister wasn't going to get her answers any quicker. After all, Nessa was just as stubborn as Elphaba herself when push came to shove. No, this was one mystery she'd have to solve alone.

 _Besides,_ she thought, _I need something to do while I figure out a way to get out of this pit without starting a cave-in._

However, checking the rooms on the second floor didn't provide much in the way of enlightenment: while she'd been staying in the guest room over the course of the last year, Boq had been moved out of the servant's quarters and deposited in Nessa's pre-governor bedroom; now, the room had been completely stripped of Boq's meagre possessions, and clearly hadn't been slept in for almost a week. Wherever he was now, he clearly wasn't staying on the second floor and hadn't been in any of the upstairs room at any point in the last seven days (unless Nessa had found time to launder literally everything he'd touched). More confusingly, the guest room was now missing its bed.

So, she took a calculated risk and decided to make use of her magic. Fortunately, she'd had more than enough time to recover her strength thanks to her long sleep, and the tracking spell immediately rewarded her with a glowing sensory trail no less than five to six days old, clearly leading out of Boq's old room and down the stairs. Keeping one eye open for Nessa, Elphaba followed the ethereal thread down to the first floor, where it immediately paused just at the foot of the staircase; if Elphaba remembered correctly, this had been the exact spot where Boq had been standing the last time she'd seen him, in the few minutes before she'd teleported the house away.

 _Okay, so he was standing here while I was talking to Nessa… and he was presumably listening. So, what did he do next?_

From there, the sensory trail led back into the depths of the house, briefly dithering around the sitting room before making a sudden beeline for the back door. Outside, the trail instantly ended less than a few feet from the back steps: wherever Boq had gone, the area on which the trail had been imprinted hadn't been transported with them.

 _He was trying to escape,_ Elphaba realized.

However, the trail suddenly reappeared, curving back in on itself and heading back inside the house… but this time, Boq was moving _much_ slower, and unless Elphaba was deeply mistaken, the tiny ethereal thread had been interwoven with another sensory trail: Nessa's.

By the looks of things, she'd been holding him very tightly… or carrying him – if not _dragging_ him.

More worryingly, the floor had clearly been washed quite extensively at some point in the last few days, and the diagnostic spells indicated that it hadn't been to wash out anything as pedestrian as mud or dirt.

Possibility number one: Elphaba had misread the whole situation, Nessa had been able to talk Boq out of a possible escape attempt and had been hugging him fiercely as she'd led him back to the house, and the only reason Nessa was keeping this a secret was because she'd done something extremely reckless while she and Boq had been exploring the caves.

Possibility number two: Boq had been shot by a sniper from the Wizard's guards while trying to escape, and Nessa had just enough time to carry him indoors before they were teleported away; she didn't want Elphaba to know what had happened because a) Boq was dead, or b) she really had copied a spell from the Grimmerie and used it to save Boq's life, and she didn't want to end up in any more hot water with Elphaba.

Possibility number three…

 _Don't go there,_ she told herself. _Don't make those kind of assumptions, not now. You need proof._

Following the trail into the depths of the house, she found that Boq had spent the next few minutes lying on the kitchen tiles (which had also been thoroughly scrubbed), before abruptly entering a cupboard that Elphaba swore hadn't existed before today. Closer examination revealed that it wasn't a cupboard at all, but a concealed entrance – padlocked, but easily circumvented: behind it, the sensory trail continued sharply downwards, as if down a flight of stairs.

 _Into a cellar. But we don't have a cellar, not at this end of the property at any rate. Nessa's been expanding the property more than I thought._

Elphaba paused, suddenly struck by with the distinct sensation of being watched. For several minutes, she hovered there, one hand lingering on the doorhandle as she peered around her for any sign of Nessarose. She'd no idea why: it wasn't as if she had anything to fear from her own sister.

Right?

Finding no sign of Nessa anywhere inside or outside, she broke the padlock in half with a jolt of telekinetic force, and swung the door open to reveal the expected staircase awaiting her, dark, gloomy and foreboding. Conjuring a light in her free hand, she gently shut the door behind her and began her descent. As she did so, she couldn't help noticing the signs of space-distorting enchantments in the walls around her: this hadn't been dug out of the cavern floor, but extended directly from the house into dimensionally-transcendental space. Presumably, the same applied to the new cellar.

 _Our house is now bigger on the inside,_ Elphaba thought furiously. _You've been copying from the Grimmerie, Nessa. That's the only way you could have accomplished something like this. How long have you been keeping these kind of secrets from me, really? And what else have you been hiding?_

At long last, she arrived at the bottom of the stairs. The cellar was pitch-black, but with the magical glow in her left hand, Elphaba could clearly see that someone had clearly been living down here: the rough stone floor was layered with carpets, and the faint shapes of chairs and tables could be seen lurking amidst the gloom; there was even a bed, purloined from the guest room by the looks of things.

Some distance away, the trail finally stopped in a gloomy corner of the cellar, just beyond the range of Elphaba's light. There, deep in the shadows, the sound of shallow breathing echoed up from the gloom.

"Boq?" she whispered.

For what felt like centuries, there was only silence.

Then, a hoarse and almost unrecognizable voice rasped out, "Elphaba? Is that you? Are you really standing there, or am I just imagining things again?"

And then, from somewhere in the darkness ahead, there was a tortured squeal of rusted spokes, and something slid awkwardly towards her. A moment later, Nessa's old wheelchair trundled into the light, shrouded with cobwebs and still layered with dust, its once-magnificent frame ruined by over a year of neglect.

Just as she'd expected, the figure crumpled against the tattered cushions of the wheelchair was indeed Boq. But even with only a feeble magic light to see by, Elphaba could clearly tell that he'd seen better days: his skin was now fishbelly white, his face patched with stubble, his hair greasy and unkempt, his trembling hands covered in sticking plasters and partially-healed cuts, the tattered remains of his uniform splattered with dried blood and fresh vomit. By the looks of things he'd also lost a good deal of weight, and Boq hadn't exactly been all that well-fed to begin with, leaving his already-spindly arms and scrawny neck almost skeletal. And his legs-

Elphaba let out a muted gasp of horror.

Boq's legs were gone, severed just above the knee, leaving only ragged, bloodless stumps in their place.

* * *

 _A/N: Feel free to furnish me with your opinions, reviews, and flames on this latest revelation!_


	5. Helplessness

A/N: And after all the medical madness of the last month or two, I'm back! I won't trouble you with the details, but I will thank all by reviewers, followers and favouriters.

 **Fae'sFlower:** I'm glad that was a surprise - I hope the confrontation lives up to it. Thanks so much for your review!

Also, be warned: **THIS CHAPTER IS EXTREMELY DARK AND MAY BROACH SUBJECTS THAT SOME VIEWERS MAY FIND DISTURBING.**

So, without out of the way, the latest chapter: read, review, and above all, enjoy!

Disclamer: Wicked isn't mine, as anyone who's seen my jumbled schedule could tell you.

* * *

For twelve long seconds, Elphaba could only stare at the ragged stumps of Boq's legs.

"What _happened?"_ she almost screamed.

Boq cringed. "Please don't shout," he whimpered. "I-I-I know it was my fault, I know I shouldn't have tried to run away, I know I should have known better but _please_ don't yell at me."

"How am I _not_ supposed to yell? I'm pretty sure your legs didn't just drop off of their own accord, not if all that blood on the floor upstairs is any evidence. So you tell me, what the hell happened to you, and why in the name of sanity are you being kept down here of all places?"

Boq opened his mouth as if to answer, but then his eyes widened and darted frantically about the room, gradually coming to rest on a point just beyond Elphaba's shoulder: the cellar door. She'd never considered herself an expert on the mind, but even she didn't need to be told what the disfigured Munchkin was afraid of – or who he was expecting to appear.

"She's not here, Boq," Elphaba soothed. "Nessa doesn't know I'm down here, and with any luck she doesn't even know I'm gone yet. Now, I don't know what happened between the two of you; granted I have a few ideas, but I need to hear the whole story now, before things get any worse."

For a moment, it looked as though Boq was going to lose his nerve and hesitate again. Then, he sighed and seemed to relax at last – though given the wary, paranoid edge to his stare, "relaxed" probably wasn't the right term to describe his current state: if anything, he was simply too tired to remain on alert, and could only slump wearily in the wheelchair as he finally gave his testimony.

"I tried to leave," he said quietly. "It wasn't something I'd planned on, believe me. By then, I'd pretty much given up on trying to escape the usual way. Even if you couldn't find me, it wasn't as if I'd be welcome anywhere in Oz after all the time I spent in Nessa's service. I mean, you you've seen how the rest of Munchkinland treated me the last time I tried to escape, so it's not as if I had any family out there; and as for my family, they were already on the verge of disowning me after I didn't show up to my mother's funeral, and once they realized I was still employed by Nessa after all her other servants had run away, they pretty much declared me a traitor to the Wizard."

"Why didn't you show up to your mother's funeral?" Elphaba asked, genuinely curious.

"Because I was too busy getting arrested for trying to leave Nessa – again."

Elphaba winced. _Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer._

"Long story short, I didn't think I'd have any cause to leave the manor after all that. But then you showed up at the house with the idea of teleporting us all to another country, and I… I couldn't go on. I couldn't go through with it, even if it was the only way of escaping arrest: I couldn't bring myself to leave Oz, not once I realized I'd be spending the rest of my life in the wilderness with only Nessa for company. I was too scared of… well, everything that could happen to me out there: starvation, thirst, diseases never seen in Oz, angry locals, wild dogs, lions, tigers, bears, you name it. And I know it's stupid, but at the time I actually thought that if I just left right then and there, I could make everything right with everyone: I could smooth things over with the angry mobs, I could clear my name before the Wizard, I could even get my family to accept me again, and maybe-"

"You were thinking about getting Glinda to notice you again, weren't you?" Elphaba sighed.

Boq hung his head in shame. "That _was_ on my mind," he confessed. "I know it sounds stupid after all this time, but I just couldn't bear it if I didn't at least _try_ one last time to make things right."

 _Like the way you tried to make things right between you and Nessa?_ Elphaba thought bitterly. Outwardly, she remained silent: as frustrating as his earlier indiscretions with her sister had been, Boq had clearly suffered enough already.

"So, once you were out of the house," Boq continued, "I waited until Nessa had finished locking up downstairs; then I stole her spare keys and made a run for it. I thought Nessarose was too busy locking the upstairs windows to notice me unlocking the back door, but… " He sighed. "I made too much noise. My hands were shaking so much, I dropped the keys almost as soon as I picked them up, and I kept getting the wrong one for every time I tried to get the door unlocked, and by the time I was out... _she'd_ found me."

"And she was angry with you."

"Not at first. She was afraid someone would shoot me if I stayed out in the open too long, and told me to come back inside. I tried to explain myself, b-but, I… well, you know how I get. The harder I tried, the worse it sounded, and in the end I just put my head down and ran for it, because I thought I'd be safe, because I know you hadn't taught her to fly or move at lightning speed or anything like that, but… I-I-I… she… t-t-the…"

Boq's voice, already halting and hesitant, dissolved into incomprehensible stuttering – before finally lapsing into a laboured, anxious silence. For several moments, he appeared to be struggling with the effort of simply breathing, his Adam's apple bobbing violently as he fought to force air back into his lungs; his body trembled violently, his brow glistened with perspiration, his eyes opened wide in naked terror, his hands clawed for a grip on the armrests as if they were the only thing keeping him from asphyxiating… and then, just as quickly as it had arrived, the attack was over.

"It was an accident," Boq said at last. His voice was dull and lifeless now, almost robotic. "It was all an accident. Nessa was angry with me; she lost her temper. I didn't realize how powerful she really was, or how much she'd really learned from you, but I hadn't gone ten feet before everything in the garden started to move: the gardener had left a huge pile of things out by the back door when he finally ran away from the manor, and by the time I heard Nessa chanting the words of the spell, it was already floating into the air – flowerpots, rakes, shovels, mattocks, hedge-trimmers, everything. And then it was all flying at me, this… blizzard of debris hammering down at me from all sides. I think I got hit in the head once or twice, even got cut by a pair of pruning shears as it shot past me-" He held up his hands, showing her the scars and sticking plasters from where the blades had nicked him. "But I managed to avoid the worst of it, and I'd almost reached the edge of the garden when…"

His hands fell to the ruined stumps of his legs.

"An axe," he said hollowly. "Sliced my left leg open, sunk into the right kneecap and… I think I blacked out. Next thing I know, Nessa was standing over me and… she was crying. She kept apologising. She dragged me indoors, operated as best as she could with the medical magic you'd taught her… but she couldn't save either of my legs: one was already cleaved beyond repair, the other got infected and had to be amputated. That was what she told me when I woke up the next day. She kept apologising all the time, but she said she'd make things right."

"And you've been down here ever since then?"

Boq nodded. "Nessa's kept me warm and fed, kept any more infections from setting in. Some nights she sleeps down here with me… or maybe _days_ – I can't tell: she hasn't let me seen the sun. I keep asking to be let out, but she keeps telling me she needs time to finds a way to break the news to you. But it's been five days, and… I miss the sun. She's always telling me that we'll have picnics in the sunshine when all this is over and I can walk again, that we'll be able to wander the gardens again the way we used to – you know, on the days when she was in a good mood. Is there sun out there, Elphaba? You said we'd be transported to a desert, but the house is always cold and damp, and I haven't seen daylight through the cellar door. Is there sun?"

Elphaba took a very deep breath. Assuming what everything she'd just heard was entirely accurate, then this entire debacle had been nothing more than an accident – a horrific accident to be sure, and one definitely exacerbated by a magical temper-tantrum, but _just_ an accident. On the face of things, it seemed as though the worst of her suspicious about Nessarose were assuaged, and she didn't have to worry about something even nastier happening. Unfortunately, Boq's testimony didn't quite gel with what she was seeing here and now: for one thing, if Nessa had been keeping him fed, was he clearly emaciated? Why had an infection been severe enough to require amputation when Elphaba's lessons had included antibacterial enchantments? What was that business about _imagining things_ Boq had mentioned when she'd first arrived? And what was that smell hovering about the place?

She paused, and sniffed the air: that bitter aroma shrouding Boq was uncannily familiar, redolent of desperate nights spent gathering herbs for Animals rescued from the re-education camps. On many occasions, she'd had to prepare some of those herbs for Animals with ailments she didn't know how to magically treat, and more than once, she'd found herself greeted by that familiar odour around the caverns and boltholes the rudimentary resistance had claimed as its own. But having read the books and seen the side-effects firsthand, she'd also learned very early on that that the herbs associated with that particular smell were often more trouble than they were worth, especially if they were used for anything other than mild sleep disorders. Try as she might, she couldn't stop the suspicions from building up; she didn't want to think the worst of Nessa, but she couldn't afford to let the matter go unexamined: she needed to know the answer to the question that was slowly taking shape at the forefront of her mind.

"Boq," she said quietly, "Has Nessa been giving you any drugs while you've been down here?"

The Munchkin's brow wrinkled. "Well, every now and again, she's given me this weird herbal stuff dissolved in water. She said it's to numb the pain and help me sleep, but I always wake up feeling worse; I can barely move my arms or grip anything for hours afterwards, and sometimes it gets so bad that Nessa has to spoon-feed me my meals. And I've been seeing… _things_ sometimes. I don't know if I was hallucinating or if I was just asleep and didn't realize it, but-"

Suddenly, Boq fell silent. Once again, he seemed to be having difficulty breathing, every inhalation reduced to a desperate, staccato gasp for air. Once again, his hands slammed down hard on the wheelchair's armrests as he struggled for a grip to arrest the panic attack – a grip that Elphaba now knew that Boq couldn't maintain. In seconds, his brow was once again drenched in sweat, and his body had begun to shiver and tremble as the now-familiar convulsions once again rippled across him. Once again, his eyes were fixed on a point just over Elphaba's shoulder, and this time, Elphaba could clearly tell without looking that someone was standing right behind her.

Very slowly, Elphaba turned. Unsurprisingly, Nessarose was standing there, her face a mask of concern and… fear?

"There's a silent alarm on the cellar door," she said quietly.

For when felt like an eternity, the cellar was almost completely silent except for the desperate rasp of Boq struggling for breath.

Then, just as Elphaba was starting to wonder if Boq's lungs would simply collapse under the strain, Nessa suddenly launched herself across the room and flung her arms around the crippled Munchkin. For several seconds, the two of them remained locked in their embrace, Nessa whispering soothingly in Boq's ears and gently stroking his hair; by all appearances, she was doing her best to calm him… but Elphaba could clearly see that Boq wasn't returning the hug; for every moment of it, his hands remained fastened on the armrests of the wheelchair, never once relaxing.

Eventually, Nessarose broke off the hug with a final affectionate pat on Boq's head, and turned to Elphaba with a confident smile – or some semblance thereof – on her face.

"You see?" she said softly. "Nothing to worry about. He's being cared for, and he's on the mend. What more do you need to know?"

Somewhere in the back of Elphaba's mind, tensions that had been slowly building towards an explosion finally erupted. " _Plenty!"_ she snapped. "How about the fact that you maimed someone and you've been keeping him locked up in an improvised cellar for almost a week? Or perhaps the fact that you decided to keep all this ongoing medical disaster a secret from me when I could have – oh, I don't know – _**helped?!**_ But let's get down to the fact that you've clearly been copying the Grimmerie behind my back and practicing highly-dangerous space-compression enchantments that _could have killed all three of us if you'd made a mistake._ Oh, and the fact that you lied to me about not copying stuff out of the Grimmerie, let's not forget that."

Nessa at least had the decency to look embarrassed; far from offering some kind of explanation or apology, however, she _hushed_ Elphaba – actually put a finger to her lips and whispered, "You're scaring Boq."

Incredulous, Elphaba looked from Nessa's smiling face to the cowering figure of Boq. "Yes," she grumbled, "Because _I'm_ the one he's afraid of. It's nothing to do with him being shut down here in the dark, and it obviously can't be anything to do with you having accidentally hacked off two of his limbs. No, it's _me._ I'm glad you're putting the blame where it belongs, Nessa. Alright then: for the sake of your patient, could I have a word with you in private?"

It took a good thirty seconds for her to drag Nessa away from Boq's side, but eventually she was able to lead her up the cellar door, just out of the "patient's" earshot, and as soon as they'd ground to a halt, Elphaba rounded on Nessa with a vengeance:

"Alright, first things first: why are you feeding him hypnos poppies and where the hell did you get them in the first place?"

Once again, Nessa could only manage a look of distinct embarrassment. "They were all I had," she admitted. "Father bought them for me as an insomnia cure in the months after you left Emerald City; there's about two or three decent-sized plants out in the greenhouse. I know it's given him a nasty case of the shakes, but I didn't have anything else to use other than my own magic, and I can't use that all the time, can I?"

"Maybe not, but you're not supposed to be giving him this much. He's hallucinating, Nessa; the moment he started reporting visions, you should have stopped the dosage and resorted to direct control of his nervous system… but that's not the only reason why you gave it to him, is it? You gave it to him because the side-effects made him easier to control. Isn't that right, Nessa?"

This time, embarrassment didn't quite describe the look on Nessa's face: now she was clearly ashamed – and afraid. "Well, can you blame me?" she said. "When he found out we were going to leave Oz, he tried to run away, and he could have gotten himself shot if those guardsmen had seen him. What if he tried to run away _this_ time?"

"Run? _Run?_ You cut his legs off, Nessa! He's not going to run anywhere!"

"I know, I know, but just supposing he tried to escape on the wheelchair, or even if he tried to _crawl_ away? I'm not prepared to underestimate the lengths he could go to just to escape, and I'm _definitely_ not willing to underestimate what might happen if he actually succeeded: he could get lost in the caverns and starve to death, he could get killed in a cave-in, he could get eaten by something – _anything_ could happen out here, Elphaba!" Nessa took a deep breath, and appeared to steady herself. "I just need to keep him down there until he comes to his senses and realizes that there's no going back to Oz: once he accepts that, he'll be fine and everything will be back to normal. You understand, don't you?"

 _This isn't about him getting homesick for Oz, Nessa: this is about him loving someone else. At this point, nothing in the world will get him to come to his senses._

"I might," Elphaba grumbled, " _if_ you'd been honest with me about what had happened to Boq."

"Well, I didn't know how you were going to react!" Nessa snapped defensively. She paused, her gaze suddenly turning sorrowful. "I made a mistake," she conceded at last. "I made one of the biggest mistakes of my entire life, and I know I should have told you what had happened right away, but… well, you were suffering too, Elphaba. You had Fiyero and Glinda to worry about, and you needed time to recover before you could start imposing work on yourself again, so I decided you didn't need to be troubled by my screw-up. So I lied to you, yes, and I hid Boq away, yes… but I did it with the intention of healing his wounds and growing new legs for him. I know it sounds stupid, but I thought that I could fix everything without ever having to disturb your rest, and… well, I thought that I could impress you with how well the healing process was going."

Elphaba closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and silently counted to the highest number she could reach without exhaling. "Nessa," she said at last, "I know I've said this already, but… _you cut his legs off._ There are some things you can't fix: if you've copied as much from the Grimmerie as I think, you might very well be able to give him new legs-"

"-I have, and I've been making good progress already-"

"-but you can't fix the fact that you've clearly _traumatized him for life!_ He's terrified of you, Nessa! Can't you see that? He started hyperventilating the moment you set foot in the room, and for every moment you were hugging him, he was bracing himself for an attack! You can't fix the underlying trust issues. I know you're in love with him, and he may have once loved you back but-"

"HE _DOES_ LOVE ME!" Nessa shrieked. "He's not afraid of me – he's just jittery from the medicine! I can make him better! I can set things right!"

From the other end of the cellar, there was a terrified yelp from Boq and the distinctive clatter of a wheelchair being overturned.

Elphaba took another deep breath, counted to a slightly higher number, and tried to think of a response that might get through to Nessarose. But the more she thought about it, the more impossible it seemed – and not merely because Nessa was at her most adamant: even if she could convince her that Boq didn't love her and never would in all probability, it would only do the barest modicum of good. After all, it wasn't as if Boq could _go_ anywhere if Nessa ever agreed to set him free, not while they were still trapped underground, gods only knew how many miles from the nearest settlements… and as much as Elphaba hated to admit it, this dysfunctional relationship might just be the only thing keeping Nessa stable – barely. Shutting things down now would only leave the two of them trapped in the manor and hating each other wholeheartedly, something they hardly needed in their current predicament.

 _Or maybe I'm just trying to justify what Nessa's done._

 _Maybe I'm just trying to avoid hurting her feelings, even if it means keeping the two of them in a toxic relationship._

 _Maybe I'm just a horrible excuse for a sister._

"Look," she said at last, "I'm not going to argue about whether or not you can make amends for what happened. For now, it's time we got Boq out of that cellar and _off those drugs_ : he's got a long road to recovery ahead of him, and he doesn't need to be cooped up in the dark and the damn for the next few months – and he certainly doesn't need to be hallucinating. You can take care of him, and I'll make sure that the property's safe and escape-proof. Can we agree to that?"

Nessa nodded eagerly, a smile back on her face at long last... though Elphaba would have felt much better if it hadn't looked so desperate.

"Of course," she said. "Of course! We'll make things right again – you'll see!"

As she hurried away, Elphaba realized that there was one last question she meant to ask, and opened her mouth to voice it… but the words died in her throat, unspoken. Because as angry as she'd been with Nessa over this latest debacle, she couldn't bring herself to hear the answer to this inquiry:

 _Was it really an accident?_

 _I've seen you training, Nessa: you didn't need to amputate either of Boq's legs. There is_ no _way a simple wood axe would have been able to leave the first one "beyond repair," not on the first swing; you'd have been able to knit flesh and bone back together easily. And the one that got infected? You can purge infections easily – I should know, I made sure of it! So, either the attack was worse than Boq told me… or you amputated those legs just so you could make sure your lover could never escape again. After all, with him unconscious he'd never know if either of his legs could've been saved. And I'm willing to bet that the reason why you didn't tell me about this was because you thought I'd take him away if I ever realized just how shabbily you were treating him._

 _So, was this really just a tragic accident, or is this what you wanted all along?_

 _Did I intervene in time? Or is my sister…_

 _Is she…_

Elphaba couldn't bring herself to finish that thought. Some things were too terrible to imagine, even for her. Nor could she bring herself to ask her original query: she knew that confronting Nessa might be the only way to stop the madness before it got any worse… but she couldn't. Every time she tried to give the question a voice, her throat seemed to tighten and freeze, cutting off speech and almost cutting off her breath as well.

From the other end of the cellar, there came the sound of Nessa whispering something excitedly into the shadows of the hastily-excavated room, followed by a series of delirious-sounding whimpers from Boq. Curious, Elphaba peered down the staircase, and saw that Nessarose had scooped Boq off the floor, and was now sitting in the wheelchair with her manservant-turned-lover propped up in her lap; she was kissing him passionately on the lips, one hand moving languidly across his sunken chest, the other entangled in his hair. But while Nessa lost herself in the kiss, Boq was clearly going through the motions, too afraid to say no even as she advanced on him.

As Elphaba watched in disbelief, the emaciated figure in the wheelchair looked back at her, eyes wide with fear and desperation, all but pleading with her for help. But before she could even bring herself to move, the familiar parade of justifications began making its way across her mind.

 _What can I do? Even if this was deliberate, it's not as if there's anything I can do about it or anywhere I can take Boq, not while we're all trapped down here. More to the point, she's my sister: I have to be there for her; I have to make up for causing this mess in the first place. I have to be here to help her. I can't just_ fight _her or try to strongarm her. I have to help her… even if I don't know how._

Elphaba sat down on the stairs and buried her face in her hands.

 _What's_ _ **wrong**_ _with me?_ She asked herself. _All my life, I've never hesitated to argue in favour of the oppressed. I've never thought twice about opposing injustice. I spoke out against the Wizard, I fought his troops all over Oz, and before it all went horribly wrong, I tried to end Animal slavery. Yes, I failed, but I_ tried. _So why can't I try now? Why can't I bring myself to end the madness in this house? Why can't I find it in myself to speak out against my own sister?_

 _Because she's all you have left,_ said an awful voice in the back of Elphaba's skull. _Your mother's dead. Your father's dead. Doctor Dillamond's dead or worse-than-dead. Fiyero's imprisoned or dead. Glinda's probably gone the same way now. All you have left is Nessarose and the crippled parody of a Munchkin she's enamoured with… and if you oppose her now, you lose her forever._

 _You are alone in this world, and all you have for company is madness – a madness you helped create. You left her alone, you let her obsessions fester and arrived to help too late: all this is your fault, Elphaba… and now the insanity you nurtured will be your sole companion for the rest of your days._

 _Enjoy it._

 _It's all you have left._

* * *

 _A/N_ : Feel free to furnish me with your opinions and theories - where can Elphaba and Nessa go from here? Just how deep does this rabbit hole go?


	6. Conflict

A/N: Aaaaaaand Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Jolly Yuletide, Satisfactory Santurnalia, Creepy Krampusnacht, feel free to plug in your own December festival of choice and a happy New Year! (gasp) Ladies and gentlemen, if I have any advice as a writer, it's this: never try to release anything in December - least of all Christmastime, not if you want to escape the month with your health and sanity intact. Likewise, the bug I picked up in November didn't help much.

But I'm back, and I have so much thanks for all my viewers, reviewers, favouriters and followers!

 **Faesflower:** On the upside, there will be further answers in this chapter, and Elphaba will be forced to see just how assertive she can get... but unfortunately, the rabbit hole can only get deeper and darker and spiral in directions ever more twisted. Thanks again for reviewing!

 **Guest:** I'm glad you like the story so far, and without saying too much... well, Elphaba's still out to find her way back to Oz, so I've no doubt Fiyero will make an appearance at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Anyway, without further ado, the latest chapter - my holiday gift for you all. Feel free to furnish me with reviews, critiques, theories, and corrections - especially to those insomnia-induced typoes that creep in at midnight. Read, review, and above all, enjoy!

Disclaimer: Wicked is not mine. I own only my own madness.

* * *

From then on, Elphaba had precious little else to do but work.

For every other hour of the day, she toiled to make their subterranean lifestyle a little safer: she helped expand upon Nessa's modifications to the greenhouse, reinforced the manor's windows, fortified the borders of the property with custom-designed trap spells, arranging for safe methods of waste disposal, gathering moisture from the surrounding area into a reservoir, and purifying the gathered water until it was safe to drink. In one particularly bold and slightly desperate experiment, Elphaba even tried to shroud the cavern roof with illusions of the sky outside, hoping that it might dispel the suffocating atmosphere of claustrophobia. It didn't work, of course: every time she tried to imagine the sky – day or night, sunny or stormy – all she could think of was the piteous sight she'd seen in the cellar, whimpering and cringing in fear as Nessa advanced on him.

When she wasn't busy fixing the house, she was trying to find a means of rebuilding Boq's ruined legs. This in itself was uphill work, for though Nessa had been very thorough in copying the spellbooks in Elphaba's possession, there were still gaps in what she'd been able to commit to paper. After all, she hadn't been able to copy _all_ of the Grimmerie. So, with nothing to guide her other than her memories of the now-confiscated books, Elphaba was forced to experiment at length on the proper means of regenerating the unfortunate Munchkin's legs. On the upside, Nessa was always there to help out. Initially, Elphaba had been a little hesitant to allow her sister anywhere near Boq's treatment after everything she'd seen down in the cellar, but after a week of cajoling, Nessa was eventually allowed into the makeshift laboratory and allowed to help out – but only under very strict supervision.

Not that it made much difference in the long run: their initial attempt to grow new legs in the lab had ended in catastrophic tissue meltdown, regenerating Boq's legs through healing spells proved almost impossible due to the sheer scope of damage, Nessa's experiments in time reversal had almost killed all three of them, and conjuring the spectral remnants of the amputated limbs only resulted in the cellar being haunted by the vengeful ghosts of dead rats for the next week. So for the time being, they were stuck growing limb transplants again.

In between experiments, housework, and other chores, Elphaba sought refuge at the dinner table, where she could review her notes away from the stink of alchemical compounds. Occasionally, she assembled a rudimentary meal from the dwindling contents of their larder and the sparse vegetables they'd grown so far, then sat there, nibbling absently at it as she tried to think of a solution to the latest conundrum in the laboratory. More often than not, she'd be joined by Nessa and Boq at mealtimes.

Fortunately, Boq was slowly recovering from the trauma of his ordeal, having been moved from the cellar and allowed to bask in the glow of the artificial sun. Less-than-fortunately, however, he was still very frightened of Nessa; as such, he spent most of his time at the dinner table flinching at every word she said, quivering uncontrollably whenever she got within three feet of him, averting his eyes every time she glanced in his direction, and occasionally screaming "don't hurt me!"

Worse still, Nessa herself claimed that her lover had managed to tear muscles in both his arms during a botched escape attempt, and insisted on spoon-feeding Boq like an infant until he was well enough to feed himself. If anything, this only made meals a thousand times more awkward: after her third dinner spent listening to Nessa cooing over her charge in nannyish baby-talk and Boq trying desperately not to suffer a nervous breakdown, Elphaba was sorely tempted to eat elsewhere… but doing so would have meant eating alone, and frankly, Elphaba didn't need any more depression.

As for what little time remained in the day, most of it was spent trying to find a way out of the caverns. Yes, she'd told Nessa she wasn't interested in making a risky attempt to find some way out of the caverns, and she'd been lying through her teeth for every moment of it, but as guilt-stricken as it had left her, it had to be done. She simply _had_ to find a path to the surface – remaining down here in the darkness was simply not on option. Ff there was any hope to be found in their exile, then it could only be found in the daylight: out there, away from the claustrophobic gloom and the harsh glow of the artificial lights, the three of them might be able to begin rebuilding their lives; among the peoples of the outskirts, Boq could eventually find some kind of refuge from his disastrous relationship with Nessa; Nessa herself could build a new life up there, maybe even realize that Boq could never be in love with her and _finally_ begin to heal; and Elphaba… Elphaba might just be able to get back to Oz and save Fiyero and Glinda. Yes, it was a long shot, and yes, the two of them might very well be already-

Elphaba's mind couldn't allow her to finish that sentence. But even if it was too late to save them, even if the tie to make a difference had already come and gone… well, she still had Nessa and Boq. They were her responsibility now; she had to protect them, nurture them, _keep them sane,_ and so far the best means of doing so involved getting them out of this hellpit and into the sun again.

So, every night, as soon as Nessa was asleep, Elphaba would leave the manor as quietly as possible and delve deep into the tunnels bordering the house. For safety's sake, she kept the central cave marked with a lodestone and always marked her trail with a luminous green thread, ensuring that she'd always be able to find her way back home no matter how far she wandered. Once again, however, it didn't make much difference: it didn't take long for her to find the shaft that Nessa had mentioned, and though a faint glimmer of moonlight was dimly visible at the top, there was no way of reaching it. Even if Elphaba had been able to scale the sheer walls of the cave, diagnostic spells revealed that the upper reaches of the shaft was simply too narrow to climb through – and trying to widen the chute would almost certainly cause a cave-in. As such, there wasn't much else to do but wander aimlessly through the tunnels and passageways honeycombing the surrounding area, hoping against hope that there might be a path to the surface.

Once, she'd managed to find a tunnel that ended in an incline leading upwards, and in a fit of excitement Elphaba had actually started digging, burrowing through the rock wall as quickly as magic and safety could allow; four days later, she finally tore through the last few feet of stone to find herself standing in yet another underground chamber. In total, she'd travelled about fifty feet upwards from her starting point: worse still, the cavern was infested with python-sized millipedes and snarling crustaceans bigger than carthorses, most of whom took Elphaba for a new and exciting form of prey. In the end, she was forced to seal the tunnel shut and try again elsewhere.

In any event, her escape attempts always ended with her creeping sheepishly home again, battered, bruised, humiliated, covered in dust, drenched with sweat, swathed in cobwebs and befouled with crustacean blood. She'd magically clean the gunk off her clothes, shower as best as she could with what little water could be spared for bathing, change into the softest gown she had, and lapse into an exhausted sleep.

Three hours later, she'd wake up, ready to start the routine all over again.

Five long, monotonous weeks went by, and Elphaba went on cycling endlessly through her routine, too busy to focus on anything other than the workload; even on the few hours where she had a little time for herself, she couldn't bring herself to divert her attention from the grim tasklist that was slowly consuming her. Every time she sat down and tried to enjoy some recreational reading, she found that she couldn't relax, much less concentrate on the words on the page in front of her; the sentences seemed to unravel before her tired eyes and dissolve into meaningless gibberish – or worse still, resolve into the dreaded words _"you should be working, Elphaba."_

Even when she finally retreated to her bed after a long night in the tunnels, she still couldn't shake the feeling that she should be up and about; indeed, the sense of restlessness was so powerful that it often kept her busy until dawn, forcing her to power through the day via a mixture of sporadic catnaps and strong coffee – an unsustainable measure, given their dwindling supplies of coffee beans. Then again, it wasn't as if the caffeine helped her: if anything, it only made her a thousand times more jittery and frustrated with herself as time went on.

Meanwhile, Boq and Nessa carried on with their private lives: Nessa continued her attempts to "make amends" for mangling her lover, feeding him, cuddling him, reading him stories, and wheeling him about the subterranean grounds by way of daily exercise; Boq continued to grapple with his deepening neuroses, barely managing to maintain what little vestiges of composure he'd managed to salvage over the last few weeks.

At times, he looked _almost_ on the verge of recovery, no doubt helped by outings in the artificial sunlight and plenty of therapeutic treatments: from time to time, he'd manage a conversation at the dinner table, sounding genuinely interested in Elphaba's experiments; he'd read every now and again, leafing through the manor's copious collection of mystery novels and tawdry romances; sometimes, he almost seemed to be repairing his relationship with Nessa, enough to share a smile or even laugh with the woman who claimed to love him.

But those islands of serenity were brief and all-too-easily sunk by stress, and the moment he left them behind, Boq was somehow even worse than before: fainting spells, crying fits, paranoia, catatonic comas, nightmares so horrendous that he lost all grip on reality for hours after awakening. On the worst days, he couldn't even get within ten feet of Nessa without screaming "don't hurt me!" and Nessa's attempts at calming him only made things worse; he'd struggle against her for every minute she was hugging him, or else simply close his eyes and go limp as a ragdoll until she finally left him alone. From time to time afterwards, Elphaba caught him scratching furiously at his skin where Nessa had touched him, as if trying to erase her fingerprints.

And then there were the _things_ she'd heard him muttering in his sleep:

"Let me see the sun…"

"No more flesh, no more flesh, no more flesh, no more flesh, no more flesh…"

"…Help me… I can't breathe…"

"Please, I don't want to do it all again, I want to live as I am…"

"…Nessa, I thought you wanted me to love you… I thought I did everything right…"

And perhaps most alarmingly of all, " _what have you done with my body?"_

* * *

In the end, Elphaba had to ask questions; after all, there was only so much she could dismiss as the aftereffects of trauma before it started getting suspicious, even with her own specialized neuroses about prying into Nessa's affairs. It took a day and a half before she was able to force aside all the irrational guilt she felt over intruding on her sister's private life and the fear of driving her away, but eventually, on one relatively placid afternoon, she was able to ambush Boq in the hall and question him without Nessarose looming over his shoulder.

"Is anything wrong?" she asked. "Apart from the legs, I mean. Has Nessa been-"

But Boq only shook his head, the fear suddenly written plainly on every feature of his face. "No," he insisted. "I'm fine. I'm better now: it's just the nightmares, I swear, just all the things that happened to me on the day we left repeating in my head. Plus, Nessa's only just got me off the hypnos poppies and it makes me a little… weird, sometimes. Nessa's been good to me, and sometimes I forget it. There's nothing wrong, Elphaba. I'm fine. Really, I'm fine."

"Boq, I'm not going to hurt you, and I'm not going to rat you out to Nessa if something's the matter. Now, please, just be honest with me: _has she been abusing you?_ Yes or no?"

"No," said Boq automatically.

 _And you'd probably say that even if she_ was _abusing you. Either way, you're terrified of her… or of the consequences of disappointing her._

"It's just that the tests… well, they're a little bit uncomfortable at times, and it's hard for me to keep everything in the right frame of mind. That's all."

That threw Elphaba for a moment. "Tests?" she echoed.

"Didn't you know? Nessa's been running tests on me every evening for the last few weeks."

" _Every evening?_ When?"

"Oh, usually at midnight. I don't sleep too well these days, so I don't mind," he added hastily.

Midnight. The exact point in time that Elphaba went off to search the caverns for a way out. In other words, not only was Nessa fully aware of Elphaba's spelunking expeditions, but she'd been taking full advantage of them.

The anger must have been plain to see on her face, for Boq's already-pasty complexion turned deathly pale. "It's nothing bad, really," he said, laughing mirthlessly. "It's just to make sure that the replacement limbs are going well. Nessa's been taking samples of skin and bone from the…" Boq's eyes flicked to the mangled stumps of his knees and visibly suppressed a shudder. "From what's down there," he finished, "and comparing them with the new legs so she has a template for healthy tissue to work by."

This was news to Elphaba: to the best of her knowledge, the two of them had finished taking samples from Boq over three weeks ago. Why in all of Oz would Nessa be taking _more_ samples from the dismembered Munchkin when the tissue templates they'd already made were still serviceable? Unless…

"And that was all she was sampling? Just skin and bone?"

"Um… I think so." But Boq's face suddenly registered uncertainty. "The last couple of days, she's also been performing check-ups after every sampling: testing my blood, measuring BPM, recording my heart rate, that kind of thing. But every now and then, she's used magic to take readings from… up here." He tapped the back of his head. "She's never explained what that's been about… but I've always gone to sleep afterwards and had some of the worst nightmares ever – or at least I _think_ they were nightmares. I've been having trouble keeping reality and dreams separate lately."

Elphaba bit her lip. This newest bit of information could mean anything at this stage: it could be an attempt to analyse Boq's mental state… or Nessa might just be trying to influence his thoughts.

The latter possibility might explain Boq's unusual dreams and the catatonic fits, and Nessa certainly had motives for performing such dark enchantments, but the theory still left an awful lot of mysteries on the table: during her time in the wilderness, Elphaba had read numerous tomes on the subject of mind control techniques, and though she'd never had the chance to practise any of them, most of the books confirmed that the first side-effects of any technique usually involved the target becoming increasingly placid and quiescent; none of them mentioned anything akin to Boq's emotional meltdowns, not even due to errors in spellcasting. More to the point, none of these rare spellbooks had ever gotten within arm's reach of Nessa: Elphaba hadn't even brought them to the manor, either keeping them in secret archives scattered across Oz or losing them to surprise raids by the Wizard's guards. So, how could Nessa be practising spells from books that Elphaba had never even brought to the house?

But if she wasn't trying to control Boq's mind, what could Nessa possibly be doing?

A third possibility: the enchantment cast on his mind was just a slow-action sleeping spell, designed to knock him unconscious without resorting to sedatives, tranquilizers or anything else that might arouse suspicion. Once that was done, she could conduct all the experiments she could like without having to worry about what Boq might say in the waking world; and as for his nightmares, maybe they weren't dreams at all, but garbled memories of things glimpsed in the rare moments when the enchantment weakened and he awoke from his slumber – like a drowning swimmer briefly surfacing from a stormy sea, before being swept beneath the waves once more.

So once again, what was Nessa trying to learn through all this experimentation? If she wasn't trying to brainwash Boq, what was she trying to do to him?

A day and a half went by, and Elphaba's search for answers turned up nothing: studying the aftereffects of the spells cast on Boq proved fruitless, for Nessa had been careful to erase her metaphysical fingerprints from the scene of the crime; her attempts at conjuring a remote-controlled "eye" to observe the experiments usually ended with some new trick in Nessa's growing repertoire of spells disabling it; all efforts to catch Nessa in the middle of a "testing session" were met with failure, partly because she never started testing until Elphaba had been gone for more than half an hour but mostly because she'd rigged the surrounding area with silent alarm enchantments and always wrapped up her sessions long before Elphaba was able to get home. Even searching their ersatz laboratory for clues didn't do any good: if Nessa was keeping any notes on her experiments, then she obviously wasn't keeping them in the lab – or in her room, or in the study, or in the basement.

And if anything, the level of secrecy only made Elphaba more worried: the last time Nessa had gotten this cagey, Boq had ended up hidden in a hastily-conjured cellar, drugged for good measure and missing both his legs. True, Nessa didn't _appear_ to have hurt Boq in the last few days – not physically at any rate – and Elphaba didn't doubt that her sister had the best of intentions at heart, but all the same, the evidence didn't exactly make Nessa look _innocent_ either.

As far as Elphaba could tell, there was only one other way to resolve this mystery – and hopefully stop whatever insanity was in progress while she was about it… and unfortunately, it meant confronting Nessarose herself.

* * *

Needless to say, it took far too long for Elphaba to finally bring herself to ask the fatal question: every time she tried to face Nessa, every time she found herself ready to demand answers for what had happened to Boq, she lost her nerve. She procrastinated, she delayed, she made excuses – each one more pathetic than the last – and for every shallow justification she thought up, the angrier she became with herself. It had been bad enough that she hadn't been able to just _ask_ if Nessa had deliberately mutilated Boq down in the cellar; now, with mounting evidence of something horrible going on behind the scenes and a sneaking suspicion that it was only going to get worse, her inability to confront Nessa drove her to paroxysms of self-loathing. For hours on end, she could only cloister herself in her room, trying to think of what to say and hating herself for every minute she remained idle.

 _Come on,_ she told herself, over and over again. _Just walk up to her and ask: "what have you been doing to Boq? What are you trying to do to him?"_ _It's a simple question, and it doesn't necessarily_ have _to have a horrible answer. I mean, for all you know, this has all been a huge misunderstanding: maybe Boq's just suffering the aftereffects of all the hypnos poppies, and Nessa's been trying some slightly unorthodox attempts at treating them. All you have to do is ask. Nessa will explain everything, Boq will be fully recovered in a few weeks, they'll be able to forgive each other, Boq's replacement legs will be completed, and together we'll be able to find a safe way out of these caverns – and maybe,_ just maybe _we'll somehow manage to salvage some kind of happy ending out of this debacle._

 _Or_ _ **maybe**_ _it'll turn out that she's been brainwashing Boq into a mindless drone – or doing something even_ _ **worse**_ _– and you'll be forced to make the worst decision of your entire life: either condone the lifelong enslavement of an innocent man, or force Nessa to change her mind – and make an enemy of your own sister. And because you're too inept to ever engineer a peaceful solution, it'll mean having to fight her… or abandon her again. Either way, you'll be alone: with Fiyero and Glinda probably dead, you'll be stranded in a country you know next to nothing about, with no friends or family left to your name – only enemies and strangers. So, faced with a choice between silently acquiescing to obvious abuses of power and trying to treat your own sister as someone just as bad as the Wizard, what would you choose? No pressure. Still think the confrontation's the best option?_

 _Oh, come on, you're being paranoid – and you're overreacting. It can't possibly be_ that _bad…_

And so on.

In times like this, she would have found herself turning mother's little green bottle over in her hands, hoping against hope – as she had when she was a child – for spectral guidance; if nothing else, reflecting on the strangest of her mother's belongings might have helped her focus her thoughts on what she needed to do.

Unfortunately, the little green bottle had been surrendered to the guards along with all her other possessions, and such focus was beyond her.

Where was the bottle now, anyway? Probably abandoned, shattered to pieces by the guards once they realized it held no magical properties other than sentimental value; after all, it wasn't as if they had any reason to _keep_ it, not when they had the Grimmerie, the broom and all of Elphaba's other books and talismans to bring back to the Wizard. All the same, that didn't stop Elphaba from blinking back tears at the thought of mother's last gift – the only remaining connection she had with her – lying discarded somewhere on the road to the Emerald City, smashed to shards of featureless green glass.

It took almost a week of introspection and self-doubt before Elphaba was finally able to approach Nessa in the sitting room one quiet morning.

Had Elphaba been a bit more mindful of the world around her, she might have wondered why Nessa seemed so downcast, or why Boq wasn't sharing the lounge with them that morning. But Elphaba had spent too much time worrying about what she was going to say, so the subtleties of her sister's mood slipped right past her and remained unnoticed until well after the conversation began. Indeed, for the first fifteen minutes, she could only sit there, biting her nails, trying to think of a way to ask the dreadful questions without sounding confrontational.

 _And there's another bit of comedy to add to the mix,_ Elphaba thought sarcastically. _How the hell are you supposed to ask "Nessa, have you been trying to brainwash Boq?" in a_ non-confrontational _way? How are you supposed to say "Sister dearest, did you deliberately set out to hack off your abortive boyfriend's legs and are you now actually intent on making him your mindless slave, or have I completely lost my goddamn mind?" without her ending the conversation before it starts? Dear gods, why did I talk myself into doing this?_

"Nessa," she began. "We need to talk. It's about-"

"-the evening check-ups, yes?" Nessa finished, without missing a beat.

There was a pause, as Elphaba struggled to find a rejoinder to this.

Nessa offered a slightly apologetic smile. "Boq panicked and told me everything about ten minutes after he finished talking to you," she said, by way of an explanation.

"Oh."

"Look, I already know what you're going to ask, so let me just sum things up for you: I was studying Boq's mind – purely for medical reasons. I know that sounds like a cheap excuse, by I _swear_ that it was just for the sake of his health. I wanted to see how he was recovering from the effects of the hypnos, if the symptoms of withdrawal had retreated. Yes, okay, I admit that I _kind of_ succumbed to temptation after a few sessions and started reading his thoughts. I know it was wrong, but I…" Nessa took a deep breath. "I needed to know what he was thinking," she said wretchedly. "I _needed to know."_

Elphaba sighed deeply. _And once again, I'm getting the distinct impression you're not telling me everything. Gods, when did we start lying to each other and why did we get so good at it?_

Out loud, she said, "Nessa, if you want to know if Boq really loves you, you could have just _asked_ him-"

"I don't need to," Nessarose snapped indignantly. "He loves me and he always will! I wasn't trying to find out _that._ I just wanted to know if…" Her tone suddenly softened, and something a little like guilt crept across her face. "If he'd forgiven me," she finished.

"For his legs?"

Nessa nodded wordlessly.

"Well, like I said, you could have just _asked_ him instead of intruding on his thoughts."

"I know, but… I'm worried that he's not being honest with me anymore, that he's just telling me what I want to hear – I mean, maybe he's afraid of me, but-"

Somewhere in the back of her mind, Elphaba's well-worn composure snapped loudly. "Of _course_ he's afraid of you, Nessa!" she exploded. "Don't you remember what happened the last time you tried to hug him? I certainly do, because his screams woke me up at half-past six in the morning! He's scared of you, and – I'm sorry to say this, but you have to hear it – it's for a very good reason: _you hacked his legs off and locked him in an improvised basement!_ You can't just pretend that didn't happen!"

"I know, I know, and I want to make things right! Why do you think I've been working so hard on the limbs? See, I know Boq loves me, but…" Nessa paused, and for a moment, she seemed to be blinking away tears. "He doesn't think I love him back," she said at last. "He thinks I hate him, that I did all _this_ just to make him suffer, and I have to make him see that this just isn't true. I _desperately_ need to help him realize that I love him, that I only want what's best for him, and yes, I made some terrible mistakes along the way, but I never meant to hurt him… and if he just lets me help him, I can make _everything right!_ He needs to understand that, don't you see? I mean, if you could just help me to make him understand – that I never meant to hurt him-"

"Did you?"

"What?"

This was the hardest question to ask, even after a week of preparation, but it had to be voiced. "Did you _really_ never mean to hurt Boq?" she whispered.

And at that, Nessa looked at her with such hurt in her eyes that it took every last atom of Elphaba's willpower just to meet her sister's gaze. "How can you even ask me that?" she demanded. "I've been trying to help him from the very beginning: everything I've done here – _everything_ I've ever done from the moment you started teaching me magic – was to keep Boq safe!"

"Does that include the amputation?" Elphaba asked softly.

Nessa's expression froze.

Here, Elphaba almost paused. She knew all too well that this was going to be the hardest thing to say, because it had been lurking at the back of Elphaba's head ever since the debacle in the cellar. The thought alone had been almost unbearable to consider, and the prospect of confronting her over it had filled her with such guilt and dread that actually taking the first step had been impossible. Gods only knew she'd been agonizing over it ever since then, alternatively cursing herself for staying silent and cursing herself for even _thinking_ that Nessa could have done something so heinous… but it had to be said – not just for Boq's sake, but for Nessa's as well: thanks to her negligence and the blind spot she'd had towards family, Elphaba had let her sister's instability grow unchecked for far too long, and if she didn't face this issue sooner or later, it was only going to get worse. But alas, that didn't make the moment any less painful – for either of them.

"I can't pretend to know just how far you've progressed in your studies," Elphaba began, "but I know for a fact that Boq's legs couldn't have been anywhere near as bad as you claim they were: with the magic you've learned, you can prevent and purge infections without even thinking about it, and thanks to all those healing spells I went to the trouble of transcribing for you, Boq might have actually been able to walk away from that "accident" with nothing more than a limp. At the very worst, he'd have needed to have the bones in his legs reknit – nothing that would have required amputation." She took a deep breath. "So tell me, just how much of that day was _really_ an accident?"

Nessa didn't answer. Instead, her gaze began to drift sharply downward, until she was staring at the floor, eye contact lost… but even from here, Elphaba could tell that she was struggling not to cry.

"I'm not here to judge you, Nessa," she continued, gently. "I'm not trying to accuse you of being a monster or to say that Boq should be taken away from you or anything like that. I just need to know what really happened: did you decide to amputate Boq's legs before or _after_ the accident? That's all I want to hear – and would you _please_ look at me while we're talking, Nessa?"

Nessa reluctantly looked up from the floor, looking uncannily like a guilt-stricken child; it took a long time for her to finally return Elphaba's questioning stare, but eventually the two of them finally locked eyes, and Elphaba saw at once that her eyes were full of tears.

"It was an accident," she confessed at last. "I wasn't lying about that part when I told Boq about it. I didn't mean to hurt him, I didn't mean for the axe to actually make contact, but I lost my temper and I wanted to stop him from getting away, and by the time I realized what I'd thrown at him it was too late to stop it. After that… well, I dragged Boq indoors, cast stasis spells, kept him from bleeding out, and then you teleported the house away. And as soon as I saw the caves, I knew at once that I needed to keep him from trying to run again: out here, with no way to the surface and Ozma only knows how many miles of tunnels, he'd lose his way and starve to death trying to escape – and worst of all, I knew it was because of me. Before, he ran because he was afraid of leaving Oz, but this time he'd run because he was afraid of _me._ And I knew there was only one way of stopping him, so I… I placed him in an enchanted sleep and I… I cut him… I sliced through his legs one by one and burned them so they couldn't be reattached and I made a cellar to keep him until he'd recovered and until he'd come to his senses and and and…" Suddenly, she was sobbing. "I _had_ to," she wailed. "Don't you understand? It was the only way I could protect him! It was the only way we could stay together, because we deserve each other and he loves me! I had to do it! I didn't want to hurt him, but _there was no other way!_ _I HAD to!_ _ **I HAD TO!"**_

For twenty long seconds, she cried, beyond coherence. Elphaba put a hand on her shoulder, but didn't hug her; as much as she wanted to hold her and say that everything would be alright, she knew she couldn't just yet. She needed to press on before she could ease off.

But it seemed that Nessa was anticipating her next move, for she whimpered, "I know what you're going to say," and even with her voice hoarse from crying, there was still a hint of cold iron in her voice. "You're going to say I should let Boq go, to send him away once and for all. I told you before, Elphaba: _we deserve each other._ "

"I wasn't going to say anything like that. I was just going to ask a question."

"Fine. Ask away."

And in the deafening silence that followed, Elphaba made her move. Once again, she knew this would hurt them both, but once again, it had to be said.

"Are you happy?" she asked.

"…what?"

" _Are you happy?_ Is your life with Boq going exactly the way you dreamed of?"

"Well, no. But I doubt you're perfectly happy either, and that's just the way things are; in a perfect world, we'd both be content with everything and we wouldn't have to live as exiles, but _this_ is the world we have to live in right now, so we take what we can get. Out here, we _can_ be happy – but not perfectly happy, of course; we just have to be patient."

"Then what would it take to make you happy? Do you have any ideas as to precisely what you'd need to be contented with your lot in life? What do you think is missing?"

Nessa paused. "I… I don't know," she admitted.

"Alright then. Do you think that Boq is happy?"

"I… no, of course not. But he'll be better: once we finish his new legs and get him up and about, he'll be just like he used to be, and then he'll be happy again. He just needs to know that I never meant to hurt him."

"And how are you planning to do that, Nessa? He's afraid of you: he screams when he sees you, he struggles every time you try to hug him, and he's almost too terrified to even look at you half the time. How can you make him trust you when he's too afraid of you to be honest about his feelings? And the sad thing is, Nessa, this isn't exactly new: it's been that way ever since I walked back into your life; I heard the way he spoke to you on the day I arrived at the manor – he wasn't your lover then, he was your servant. So, how can you make things right when status quo you're aiming for hasn't been right for _years?"_

"That was before he knew what he wanted!" Nessa protested. "That was when he still thought he wanted Glinda – but he knows better now: he loves _me,_ not her! We belong together! We deserve each other! We'll be _happy_ together!"

It took all of Elphaba's willpower not to scream denials. Instead, she took a slightly deeper breath, and asked the simplest question of all: "When?"

"What?"

"When will you be happy together?" Elphaba asked pointedly. "Have you ever _been_ happy together? Has there ever been a single moment in your lives in which the two of you have been truly happy?"

"Yes, of course: the dance at the Ozdust ballroom, when Boq told me I was beautiful."

"And after that?"

Nessa opened her mouth to answer, but for once, she had nothing to say. Instead, an awkward silence ensued, and for a moment it looked as though her gaze might turn downcast again, but at the last minute she once again locked eyes with Elphaba, and she stopped – though whether it was out of wounded pride or a desperate pretence of confidence, Elphaba couldn't say.

"Come on, Nessa, just give me an example. One instance in which you and Boq were honestly contented together. No fear, no nervousness, nothing forcing you to be together, no violence overshadowing things. Just one moment of happiness: a kiss, a hug, hands held in the corridor, a smile shared over a sunset, a realization that you had something in common, anything – I don't care how mawkish; just give me one simple moment."

Once again, Nessarose was silent.

"Don't you see, Nessa? You've never been happy together, and you never will. Too much has gone wrong: you've accumulated too much pain and heartbreak for this to ever work out. The longer you're together, the more miserable you become, and it's never going to stop. The only thing you can do-"

"No."

" _The only thing you can do-"_

"I said-"

" _-is let Boq go_ ," Elphaba finished loudly. "I'm not saying you have to fling him out of the house to die in the caverns. I'm just saying that, when the time comes, you need to go your separate ways: once Boq's legs are finished, once we've found a way back to the surface and back to some kind of civilization, you wish him all good fortune and allow him to make a new life for himself."

 _And hopefully, the sad silly bastard won't waste that life trying to cross the Deadly Desert back into Oz just so he can propose to Glinda._

"So _that's_ what you want," Nessa hissed, her voice now purest vitriol. "You want Boq to be adrift in a country he knows nothing about, and you want _me_ to be alone."

Once again, Elphaba's patience snapped. " _Look_ at yourself, Nessa: you're not just the girl in the wheelchair anymore, and you haven't been her for over a year. You're not tragically beautiful anymore, you're not an outcast anymore, and you're not the Wicked Witch of the East. More to the point, we're in a country that doesn't even know who you were or about what happened back in Munchkinland – or at least we will be once we're up on the surface and out of the wilderness. Once we've made it back to civilization, you're not going to be alone, Nessa: you're young, beautiful, clever, and you're a talented witch; the suitors will be lining up around the block to propose, assuming they can beat all the prospective employers there first."

"And here I was, thinking you were a realist above all else," said Nessa bitterly. "You have absolutely no proof that it's going to be any better than it was back in Oz, do you? You haven't been outside the country; all you know of the lands beyond Oz is what you've read in books!"

"Maybe so, but I can guarantee that you're actually going to have options for a change."

"What's _that_ supposed to mean?"

"At the risk of sounding harsh, Nessa, the only reason you've stayed together as long as you have is because neither of you had a choice in the matter."

Nessa opened her mouth to reply – and in that moment, there was a muffled _whoosh_ from the front door, loud enough to be heard from the sitting room, and even from her position Elphaba couldn't mistake the telltale spark of magic in the air.

"…what was _that?"_ Nessa whispered.

Elphaba thought for a moment. "Probably a teleport spell."

"You're sure?"

"As sure as I can be under the circumstances: the sound and the sense of the magic line up close enough. I haven't used that kind of spell often, but you don't forget that distinctive rush of air displacement in a hurry. Trouble is, nobody knows we're down here; in fact, from what I can tell, these caverns haven't even been breached by the outside world, much less explored. Either we've found ourselves in someone's private underground sanctum-"

"Or Oz have finally found us."

"It's a possibility," Elphaba admitted. "Then again, it's no surprise that it took this long for them to catch up with us: tracing teleportation spells isn't easy, even for someone as skilled as Morrible."

"Any idea what could have been teleported? People, objects, animals?"

"Your guess is as good as mine: from what I recall from my research, that kind of spell's only useful for sending individuals, handheld objects, that kind of thing. They could have sent an assassin after us… or they could have just left a bomb on the doorstep and called it a day."

Instantly, the room was plunged into a terrified silence; all of a sudden, neither of them had anything to say: horror had killed any further potential for discussion – and even if it hadn't, there honestly wasn't much left to say.

Very slowly, the two sisters rose from their seats and crept tentatively down the hall, instinctively readying themselves to fight as they did so. But when they finally opened the door, they were greeted by little else than the familiar vista of echoing caverns and boundless shadows; a quick magical scan of the area revealed no intruders, no explosives, no poisons, no contagions, no hazardous wildlife – nothing that could logically pose a threat.

In fact, the only new arrival was a plain brown envelope sitting on the front step. Unsurprisingly, it had been sealed with green wax and the distinctive z-inside-the-o emblem of Oz.

A bevvy of spells from both Elphaba and Nessa revealed that the envelope's contents were harmless: nothing cursed, hexed, enchanted, contaminated, infectious, corrosive, poisonous, or combustible; nothing but paper and ink – plus the fading vestiges of the teleport spell that had delivered it. All the same, Elphaba couldn't help but feel a tiny pulse of anxiety ripple down her spine as she opened the envelope and unfolded the letter inside.

 _Dear Elphaba,_ it read.

 _I know you're alarmed that we managed to track you down, but please give me the benefit of a doubt: this is not the prelude to an attack, assassination, kidnapping attempt, etc, etc, etc. I know you've no reason to believe me when I say this, just as I know how badly our last meeting ended, and yes, I know that you left Oz under… trying circumstances. I can only assure you that Fiyero Tiggular and Glinda Upland are alive, healthy, and in no danger; they haven't been left to rot in Southstairs or anywhere like that – on the contrary, they are being held in protective custody in a luxury apartment here in the Emerald City (if you like, I can even provide written proof from them)._

 _I don't doubt that you're reading these words with the deepest scepticism, but please believe me when I say that it is my sincerest hope that we can work together as you once hoped, and that I can convince you of my good intentions. I can't imagine what your life out on the frontier has been like: Morrible has been able to confirm that you're still alive, but I doubt that it's at all comfortable out there on the fringes. In fact, I'm not even sure how you're managing to stay alive out there; I know you're a strong and determined young woman, but I imagine even you'd tire of the constant struggle. So, why not make things easier? Why not set aside the burden you've been carrying all these years, and make a new life for yourself in my service? I'm willing to discuss terms if you are: we can negotiate Animal rights, we can find ways to reintroduce you to the Ozian public – we can make you and your sister beloved by all._

 _All you have to do is make your way back over the border and surrender to the guards stationed at the nearest teleportation gate. You will not be harmed – you have my word. You'll be able to see Fiyero and Glinda again; you'll be able to ensure Nessa's safety; you'll be able to find the place in Ozian society that's been denied you for so long._

 _Don't you think you've earned the chance to be happy?_

 _Sincerely_

 _His Ozness, the Wizard of Oz, Emperor of the Four Great Nations of Oz, Saviour of the Ozian peoples…_

The page ended in about five lines of titles, all written in the Wizard's extravagant calligraphy.

Elphaba took a very deep breath, crumpled the letter into a ball and threw it over her shoulder. "Do I even need to say anything at this point?" she asked wearily.

"Apart from 'obvious trap,' not much," Nessa replied. "He clearly doesn't want to risk sending troops into uncharted territory and he doesn't want to take the chance of having Morrible launch a magical attack on the house just in case you counterattack, so he wants you back in Oz for an ambush. Question is-"

"Does he want me dead or alive? Either one's possible at this point: the Wizard's wanted me on his side ever since he learned about my powers, and even during the worst of my days as an enemy of the state, he never rescinded the capture order on me. Plus, with Glinda disgraced and Morrible's liver just about ready to implode, I imagine he wants a replacement witch ready to go… but on the other hand, maybe I've finally proved that I'm too much trouble to recruit. But by the same logic, why would he bother going to all this effort to track me down? If he knew of my plan to leave Oz, he'd probably think it much safer just to let me run for the hills and gloat to the people at how he drove the Wicked Witch into a cowardly retreat. So why waste so much time and magic on the kind of spells necessary to track me down?"

"I very much doubt it matters at this point, Elphaba. We're not responding, so there's no point wondering about it. End of story."

* * *

Unfortunately, Nessa was wrong.

Exactly three days after the letter had arrived, another one materialized on the doorstep with even less fanfare than the first; indeed, Elphaba only noticed it because it ended up getting stuck to Boq's wheelchair as he trundled over it one morning.

The contents of the envelope were exactly the same, the overall message more or less identical: the only difference lay in the length of the Wizard's honeyed overtures. Here, he devoted almost eight paragraphs to all the things he could do for Elphaba, crowding the paper with one extravagant promise after another: freedom for the Animals, the immediate release of all arrested individuals, the rehabilitation of Animals who'd been "silenced", a suitable new habitat for Chistery and the Flying Monkeys, therapy for Fiyero's ruined legs, the reinstatement of Glinda's position within the government, a luxurious palace for Nessa, and a ludicrous assortment of titles, honours, awards and ennoblements for Elphaba. He even promised to subject any guards suspected of mistreating her or her friends to "immediate prosecution to the fullest extent of the law."

Elphaba would have dismissed the cavalcade of rewards as empty promises and little else – had the Wizard not also promised to share the contents of Madam Morrible's private library of puissant spellbooks, cursed scrolls and other forbidden texts with her; this gave her pause if nothing else, for Morrible still held a great deal of influence around court and probably took a dim view of anyone attempting to breach her jealously-guarded archives. Why risk a feud with the press secretary when she was the only one able to send these letters?

Nonetheless, Elphaba tore up the letter just as she had the first and thought no more of it.

Three days later, another arrived: by this time, the Wizard must have realized that hollow attempts at bribery weren't doing him any good, and as such, the newest letter arrived with proof of the Wizard's "good intentions." Inside the envelope was a small stack of photographs, each one depicting Glinda and Fiyero, both of them alive, healthy and living out their days in luxurious captivity – apparently unaware of the photographer lurking just outside their window. But for all the images of five-star meals and regular medical attention that the Wizard had included, he couldn't hide the fact that Fiyero now walked with the aid of crutches, nor could he conceal the dark rings around Glinda's eyes. They weren't being mistreated, but they definitely weren't thriving.

 _See?_ The letter read. _They're okay. You can trust me._

Elphaba rolled her eyes and shredded the letter into confetti. But in spite of herself, she kept the photos; as grim as these images were, they were a connection that Elphaba honestly couldn't do without – and soon, they might be the only thing keeping their faces from vanishing from her memory.

Three days went by, and then another letter arrived, this time with samples of the legislative paperwork that would guarantee Animal Rights within a year. To Elphaba's surprise, it seemed almost genuine, but she knew that the source couldn't possibly be trusted. So, another letter was consigned to the garbage.

A week went by and the procession of letters continued, each one more desperate and toadying than the last. Eventually, Elphaba had to wonder just what was prompting this attempt to bring her out of hiding: was the Wizard hoping for a live execution to calm the baying of the mob? Had Morrible insisted that Elphaba was too dangerous to the regime even outside Oz's borders? Or was there some magical disaster in Oz that the Wizard – or Morrible – believed that only Elphaba could end? At the moment it was impossible to tell, for the Wizard gave no hint as to why he needed her back, only that he needed her back very soon.

For the time being, she saw no need to panic: despite his cloying offers, the Wizard made no threats in any of his letters, nor did he give any indication that he might harden stance. So, she went on tearing up letters…

* * *

And then one morning, she stumbled downstairs just in time to see Nessa hastily tiptoeing away from the front step; even half-asleep and bleary-eyed as she was, Elphaba could tell that her sister was quite clearly trying to hide something behind her back.

"What's _that?"_ Elphaba demanded.

"What's what?" she replied, doe-eyed and innocent.

Elphaba sighed deeply. "Are we really going to do this sort of thing this early in the morning?"

"…you've completely lost me, Elphaba."

"No I haven't. If anything, I'd say you're following every word I've spoken. After all, you were the champion at this little game when we were kids – except this time you don't have wheelchair to hide the letter in."

A faint blush of garnet flooded Nessa's pale cheeks. "You remember that trick, huh?"

Was it Elphaba's imagination, or was there a nervous tremor in her voice? Was she afraid, or was it just surprise at being revealed so easily?

"You act like I'd ever forget," Elphaba continued briskly. "As I recall, it was the nearest you ever got to rebelliousness. And as fun as this trip down memory lane has been, I think its best if we wrap it up before it gets any more ridiculous: so, would you _please_ stop being coy and just hand over the letter."

Nessa hung her head and deposited the offending message in Elphaba's outstretched hand; immediately, she noticed two things: first, the envelope had already been opened; second…

…it was _dripping._

Long before the first drop hit the ground, long before she saw the distinctive crimson stain drenching the corner of the envelope, Elphaba could already tell that it was blood: there was no mistaking that metallic stench.

Trembling, she reached into the envelope, hands straying as far from the corners as possible, and drew out the letter. In another unexpected distinction from the norm, the letter was clearly not written by the Wizard: gone were the ostentatious sweeps of the Wizard's penmanship and the flamboyant calligraphic flairs at the end of each paragraph, replaced instead by obsessively neat sentences written in a hand so pedantic and spidery that there was no mistaking the author.

 _Miss Elphaba,_ it read.

 _Your silence has not been appreciatified by the Wizard, so he felt that my unique approach would be more efficatory in squeezing a response from you. I can't pretend to know what he wants from you after the disappointment you proved on your last meeting, but that's beside the point. He wants you to surrender to him, and you_ will _– or you'll discover the consequences of your freedom._

 _In this envelope, I have included a teleportation charm: it has been specificaciously enchanted to provide one-way transportation to the Emerald City, and it will only respond to you. All it requires are a few moments of concentration – something I should hope that you would still be capable of._

Sure enough, sitting in the envelope was a thin stone disc no bigger than a playing card, heavily layered with enchantments, all of them aligned towards safe, reliable one-way teleportation.

 _Use this only by my instructions,_ the letter continued. _The sieving enchantments will ensure that you can only use it if you are unarmed, unprotected, and using the device of your own free will. You have twenty-four hours to use it. If twenty-four hours elapsify and you do not arrive in the capital, I will assume you have ignored my warnings and I will have to make the next one a tad more… authoritative._

 _The Wizard would have me believe that it's easier to catch flies with honey, but after forty-five long years of experience in the game of hunting, luring and snaring unwary witches, I know better. The easiest way to lure a fox is with a rabbit's screams._

 _So, let me make this unmistakably clear: if you refuse my invitation to the Emerald City, Captain Fiyero and Miss Glinda will suffer._

 _The Wizard thought you needed proof, so it has been provided accordingly._

 _Signed,_

 _Madam Morrible_

Trembling, Elphaba reached into the envelope one last time… and held out a bloodied human finger, severed at the knuckle.

It was a little hard to tell with the coating of gore layering it, but it looked to be the ring finger… and unless Elphaba was horribly wrong, judging by long nails and the slender bone structure, this was a woman's finger.

Very slowly, Elphaba let both the envelope and the grisly souvenir fall from her hand, and very slowly collapsed into a sitting position on the staircase.

"You were keeping this from me," she whispered, unable to keep the disbelief. "You were trying to make sure I never found it – until it was too late."

Nessa couldn't even bring herself to meet Elphaba's accusing gaze, let alone speak. Instead, she only nodded silently.

"And you'd have been willing to hide or destroy the next few messages as well? To let Morrible torture Glinda and Fiyero to death?"

In spite of herself, Nessa managed a bitter, agonized-looking smile. "If it meant saving you? Without hesitation."

This time, it was Elphaba who suddenly found herself at a loss for words.

"They're going to kill you," Nessa continued. "You know that, don't you? Once you use that charm, your life is over: the moment you arrive in Emerald City, they'll cut your throat, put your body on display, and execute Fiyero and Glinda just for good measure. You're not saving anyone by caving in, Elphaba. Stay here with me, and we'll work out some kind of strategy. Together, we can find a way to make things right."

There was a deathly pause as Elphaba slowly recovered enough to speak again; immediately, she tried to keep her tone low and neutral, but even she couldn't keep the anger from her voice. "And that was your intention when you started hiding these letters from me, was it?" she asked, bitterly. " _Making things right?_ "

" _Everything_ can be made right, Elphaba. Don't you know that? All it takes is effort and perseverance."

"Oh, so we're applying your unique approach to "convincing" Boq to _my_ problems, are we? Bit of a change from the last time I wanted to return to Oz and save my friends. As I recall, you said there was no point trying and that the best thing I could do was stay here with you: you said escaping from the caverns was impossible. So tell me: when, exactly, were you going to tell me that we _could_ save Fiyero and Glinda, exactly – before or after we'd ended up with a severed head in the mail?"

"Elphaba, _please…_ I only did it for you. Everything I've done in this house has been to keep you and Boq safe: it hurts, I know, but it was the only way I could save the two of you from yourselves."

"And what about Glinda? Don't you care about _her?"_

"Look, I know it sounds heartless, but sometimes you have to prioritize your family and beloved over simple friends. I know you've made that choice before: when the Wizard started cracking down, you chose to save me ahead of any other Animal in Oz. Doesn't it stand to reason that-"

"Nessa, Glinda is the only reason you're "together" with Boq at all: he wouldn't have even thought of asking you out if Glinda hadn't sweet-talked him into it!"

Slowly, Nessa's calm, composed expression gave way to a stunned gape. Elphaba had finally given voice to the unspeakable, the one thing that she'd been tiptoeing around ever since she'd stumbled back into her sister's life.

"Boq doesn't love you, Nessa," Elphaba plunged on, for once too angry and upset to be diplomatic around family. "Never has, never will, and the best thing you can do for yourself is to fix the damage you've caused, and then _go your separate ways and recover your lives…_ much as we're doing now." She reached down and hastily retrieved the teleporter charm from where she'd let it fall. "Now, I'm sorry… but I have to go, now."

"You can't do this," Nessa whispered, her eyes wide and disbelieving.

"It's not a question of what I can and can't do, Nessa: it's what I _have_ to do. You know I can't leave them to die any more than I could leave you to the same fate – anymore than you could let _Boq_ die. I've been trying to get out of these caverns almost every single night since I got here – you know that well enough; I wanted to get out on our own terms, but-"

" _You can't do this."_ Now, the whisper was a glacial hiss of anger; the look of incredulous shock had vanished from Nessa's face, replaced by a scowl of dawning rage.

"-we don't have a choice," Elphaba finished. She was already reaching for the teleporter charm, ready to send herself away the moment she had finished saying her goodbyes. "I know it isn't fair, but-"

"YOU CAN'T DO THIS!"

And without warning, Nessa was in motion, launching herself across the room with a swiftness and ferocity that would have been utterly impossible without magic. Caught off guard, Elphaba had just enough time to yank the teleporter charm out of reach before Nessa slammed into her at high speed with an incoherent scream of rage, no longer a human being but a living whirlwind of flailing, clawing limbs – each one making a frantic grab for talisman in her hand. Elphaba tried to wrestle her sister's hands away with all the magic she could muster, telekinetically prising the clawing fingers from her arms as best as she could, but Nessa only retaliated with magic of her own and tried to pluck the teleporter charm from her outstretched hand by sheer force of will. Elphaba let out a howl of pain as Nessa's magic grip tightened around her hand, tearing ligaments and straining bones to breaking point, finally forcing her away with a blast of emerald light and raw kinetic energy; Nessa hurtled away, toppling over a grandfather clock and shattering an ornate vase as she crashed against the wall. And before Elphaba could take the opportunity to speak, to reason, to negotiate – to do _anything,_ really – Nessa had already recovered and was lunging towards her yet again.

For the next few minutes, the two were locked in a brutal thaumaturgical melee spanning most of the ground floor: Nessa tried to make a grab for the charm; Elphaba countered and tried to push her away; the aggressor charged again with renewed vigour, the defender parried the blow, and so the battle spiralled onwards, every iteration more brutal than the last. For the longest time, the two were at stalemate: it was immediately apparent that Nessa had been secretly learning much more than Elphaba suspected, for the repertoire of combat magic would have been the envy of any garden-variety student magician… and yet, even with all the techniques that her sister had covertly mastered over the last two years, Elphaba was still the stronger and more experienced of the two, but was ultimately hampered by the simple fact that she didn't actually want to hurt her sister. By contrast, Nessa didn't seem to care about anything except destroying the charm, allowing her to remain permanently on the offence.

Summoning a storm of tiny razorblades, she sent them hurtling towards Elphaba's undefended arms, clearly hoping to make her drop the charm – or just to slice her radial arteries open. Elphaba countered with a shield of heat that disintegrated the blades in mid-flight; reaching out with her telekinetic grasp, Nessa gathered up a jumbled assortment of crockery, books, chairs and ornaments, before flinging them at Elphaba – who simply swatted them aside, returning each item to its proper place with barely a gesture. Nessa called out to the foundations of the building, reshaping it into quicksand beneath Elphaba's feet, then summoned arms of plaster from the ceiling to snatch the charm out of her hands; Elphaba simply froze the quagmire solid and de-animated the plaster with a single contemptuous word. Nessa conjured a portal and flung herself through it, lunging at Elphaba from behind – but seized nothing but empty air; Elphaba had made herself intangible for the briefest of instants. Nessa then reached out to the dark corners of the room and moulded the shadows into a colossal bouquet of tentacles that lashed out at Elphaba, ensnaring her limbs even as they reached for the charm; Elphaba conjured a beam of searing light that sliced clean through the tentacles – only to be brought up short by a small army of reflections attacking her from the mirrors.

By that stage, the two of them had arrived in the sitting room, and Nessa had abandoned complicated magical duelling in favour of once again tackling Elphaba head-on with all the kinetic energy she could summon. Unable to remain upright under the onslaught, the two of them crashed to the ground in a wild eruption of magical energies, overturning chairs, sending books flying from the shelves and shattering a coffee table to atoms.

Head ringing from the impact with the floor, Elphaba was dimly aware that Nessa's left arm was getting uncomfortably close to her neck, even as the right one snaked out towards the charm.

 _Is she really that desperate?_ She wondered. _Is she willing to_ strangle _me just to stop me from leaving?_

"Nessa-" she began.

" _You can't do this,"_ Nessa snarled. Her fingers tightened around Elphaba's right hand, long nails digging bloody crescents in her skin even as she tried to prize the charm loose from her grasp. "You're not leaving me alone like you did last time. You're staying right here where it's safe. _I'm not losing anyone else!"_

And in that moment, Elphaba realized there was only one thing to do under the circumstances.

Summoning all her remaining reserves of energy, she telekinetically flung Nessa off her; then, as she lurched upright, she seized the Ruby Slippers from Nessa's feet and plucked them off, tossing them into opposite corners of the room, well out of reach.

Then, she ran for the door, slamming it shut behind her – and then shoving the heaviest bookshelf in the corridor across it for good measure.

From behind the sitting room door, she could already hear the sounds of Nessa screaming in rage as she awkwardly hauled herself across the room in search of the Ruby Slippers; after over a year spent bolstered by their enchantments, she had almost forgotten what it was like to be unable to walk, and the effort required simply to crawl after the magical footwear was clearly nothing short of herculean. And if those unladylike expletives were any evidence, it certainly wasn't doing Nessa's temper any wonders.

Taking a deep breath to steady herself, Elphaba reached for the teleport charm, preparing to activate it – and that moment, Nessa screamed at her from behind the door, her voice thick with tears.

"You really think you can save them, Elphaba?" she howled. "You won't. People like us never get what we want. The Wicked Witches earn nothing but loneliness and suffering." She laughed bitterly through her tears. "Goodness knows the wicked die alone…"

Elphaba sighed deeply, and tried to think of something that could somehow make this right, something that would comfort Nessa in her misery, something – _anything_ – that could make Nessa believe that she wasn't abandoning her.

But, of course, there was nothing. Nothing could justify what she was about to do, nor was there anything to justify staying. Her mind was empty at that point… and waiting around any longer would only give Nessa the time she needed to get the Ruby Slippers back on and break down the door.

In the end, all she could do was whisper, "I'm sorry," as she activated the charm and teleported herself out of the caverns...

…and into a different sort of captivity altogether.

* * *

A/N: What happens next, dear readers? Feel free to furnish me with your theories as always!


	7. Numbness

A/N: Aaaaaaargh! I'm so sorry for the three-month hiatus, ladies and gents, but I've been so swamped with work and family events that I've barely been able to work on _one_ of my other stories. I can only beg your forgiveness for the suspense, and I'll do my best to post more promptly.

In the meantime, without further ado, the latest chapter: read, review, and above all, enjoy!

Disclaimer: Wicked be not mine, good people.

* * *

Elphaba didn't remember how she arrived in the cell.

She'd wracked her mind for hours on end, but there was no recognizable transition between teleportation to imprisonment: there were no angry shouts, no jackbooted feet kicking out at her from all angles, no net flung over her, no black bag yanked over her head – so she probably hadn't been teleported directly into a guard ambush; there was no sudden change in the magical fabric of the spell, no subtle shift in direction, so she presumably hadn't been redirected into jail; she couldn't even recall where the spell had deposited her.

One minute she was being teleported out of the manor house, the next, everything had gone pitch-black. When she'd awoken, she'd found herself sprawled on a bare mattress tucked against the back wall of a rough concrete holding cell, with her cloak and dress replaced by a coarse prison jumpsuit and her hat nowhere to be found.

Though the cell around her seemed fairly rudimentary at first, closer examination revealed that this was actually the most secure location that the Wizard could keep her in: from what little she could work out, the walls were immensely thick and lined with arcane enchantments specifically designed to diffuse hostile spells; the door was a reinforced steel airlock layered with more anti-magic enchantments, and probably dense enough to shrug off an artillery shell anyway; for good measure, her meals weren't even delivered through the airlock, but dismissively slid through a pressurized slot at the base of it. Also, she'd evidently been considered too dangerous to entrust with a window, or any sort of ventilation leading outside, and with most of her magic dampened by the enchantments shrouding the cell, it was absolutely impossible to work out where she'd ended up; she could be in Southstairs prison, or she could be hidden under the Wizard's palace itself – she could be _anywhere_ in Oz and nobody would ever find her.

On the upside, Elphaba was still being fed, so her jailers weren't going to just leave her to starve to death. Plus, the fact that she'd actually been given a _door_ instead of simply being immured in the cell indicated that she was going to be removed from the cell at some point – or, at the very least, that someone was going to see her at some point in the dim and distant future. So far, however, the jailers weren't in the mood to speak with her:

Unfortunately, the list of positives wasn't looking particularly generous at this stage: other than the possibility of being moved or _maybe_ negotiated with, the only bright side to the situation was that Glinda would be spared any further torture.

On the downside, Glinda was still in jail and would probably remain there unless Elphaba could negotiate her release; Fiyero was also jailed and probably crippled as well; Elphaba herself was probably facing life in prison – assuming that the Wizard didn't just have her executed; and Nessa... well, Nessa and Boq had been left behind in the caverns, with all their troubles unresolved and plague of difficulties on the horizon for both of them.

Still, that meant there was another positive to the situation: Nessa was safe. No matter what happened to Elphaba, she could rest easy knowing that the Wizard's forces would never find Nessa, no matter how hard they tried.

It wasn't much, but at this point, it was the only hope she had left.

* * *

With no window, no visits to exercise yard, and no means of measuring the passage of hours except for the daily meal, it was impossible to guess at the flow of time in prison. For all Elphaba knew, she could have been there for days; for all she knew, she could have been there for less than an hour. In the end, the only clear thing about the situation was that – after a long boring period spent pacing the cell – there was a rumble from the airlock, and the door finally swung open.

But before Elphaba could get a decent look at whatever was behind it, the lights in the cell flickered off with a hollow metallic _thud,_ instantly plunging the cell into stygian darkness. She had just enough time to recognize the sound of booted feet rushing towards her at high speed, before the guards descended on her with roar of angry shouts and barked orders: a multitude of vicelike hands clamped down over her limbs and shoulders, one set yanking a bag over her head, another set fastening a pair of handcuffs around her wrists, and another still began shackling her legs. She'd no idea how any of the guards could possibly see what they were doing with so little light to see by; maybe Madam Morrible had given them enchanted lenses, maybe this was a routine they knew so well by now that the darkness simply didn't matter – whatever the case, they trussed her up with contemptuous ease and hauled her out of the cell in a matter of seconds.

Things got blurry after that: she was dimly aware of the sounds around her, of the constant opening and shutting of prison gates, of the omnipresent rumble of distant conversations, the disorderly clomp of footsteps flanking her on all sides… but once again, time was impossible to gauge. Maybe if the guards had let her feet touch the ground, she could have counted the footsteps, but with her legs dangling helpless in mid-air, she was essentially hovering in timeless void until the guards finally halted at the end of the path.

Finally, after a small eternity spent floating down corridors and being whisked through buildings too large to even guess at, Elphaba found herself being hastily stripped of her handcuffs and strapped into a chair. Only then was the bag finally removed from her head; it took a while before her eyes had adjusted to the dazzling light, but eventually she found herself sitting in yet another cell – with a difference.

The room was divided in two by bars of reinforced steel set into the concrete of the cell floor; even with her magic in working order, she'd have had trouble pounding her way through the bars, but since the place was layered with the same nullifying enchantments her own cell had been fitted with, spellwork was impossible right now. Searing arc lamps glared down at her from all angles of her cell-segment, each machine a miniature spotlight keeping her in full view of the guards on her end of the cell; for good measure, even with the dazzling light of the arc lamps stabbing down on her, she could just about recognize a viewing gallery above them, in which stood at least thirty of the Wizard's elite guards. All of them armed with top-of-the-line rifles and ready to fire at a moment's notice – and with good reason.

Seated at a finely-crafted desk on the other side of the bars was none other than the Wizard himself.

Dressed as always in his signature grey trenchcoat and dapper garb, he looked almost the same as he had on the day they'd first met… except for the look on his face: the near-omnipresent smile was gone from his face, the jovial expression nowhere to be seen, and even the spritely glow of health he'd worn throughout that fateful meeting seemed to have disappeared. Then again, it could have just been Elphaba's imagination – after all, why would the Wizard have any reason to look subdued, let alone distressed? He'd _won._ He had everything he wanted with the possible exception of a contract promising Elphaba's indentured servitude in perpetuity. What reason could he have to be downcast? What more could he possibly want? Maybe he was just afraid. Again, not much reason for it after all the precautions he'd taken, but it wasn't as if the man was well-known for his overwhelming bravery.

For eighteen long seconds, the two of them stared at each other, clearly not knowing what to say.

In the end, the Wizard was the first to break the silence, clearing his throat with an unpleasant-sounding cough. "Elphaba," he said at last. "You look well."

Elphaba said nothing. After all, what could she possibly say, other than "drop dead"?

"I trust the guards here have been treating you decently. Erm, I specifically forbade corporal punishment; Madam Morrible disagreed, of course, even after all the extra security precautions were installed on her advice, but I insisted that you be allowed some leniency now that you're back on Ozian soil. After all, I can't imagine what your stay beyond our borders must have been like. True, she argued that your refusal to reply to my letters was a sign that you couldn't be trusted, but… well, the remoteness of your exile, the near-impossibility of properly locating you, the fear and paranoia… these things happen." He offered a theatrical shrug, and laughed mirthlessly.

 _Is he… trying to make small talk?_

"Anyway," the Wizard continued, half-briskly half-nervously, "I was hoping to have a little talk about your…" He hesitated, eyes darting wildly around the cell. "…your potential," he continued at last. "I mean, your stay here needn't be permanent, and I was hoping that I might be able to prove that… er, with a little time and a little rehabilitation in the eyes of the public, you might be granted the title of Grand Vizier."

Elphaba groaned. "Are you _still_ hanging on to that idea even after all this time?" she asked wearily. "That's the only reason why you haven't had me executed, is it? I was at least hoping you'd be getting me ready for a show trial or two, maybe a round of public humiliation, but instead, you're falling back on the same plans you had when we first met. You really think the people of Oz would tolerate me as your vizier, after all the effort you put into dragging my name through the mud? Do you really think _I'd_ tolerate the same offer after finding out what you were doing to the Animals?"

"Look, I understand you're angry, Elphaba, but-"

"For your information, I'm not angry. Anger would require energy, which I don't have right now – having blown most of it worrying about the friends you've been _carving fingers off."_

"…I-I understand you're angry and tired, Elphaba, but if you'll just bear with me, I can prove to you that I can be…" He floundered again, visibly struggling for words. "…a force for good in Oz. I mean, I'm not a tyrant by any means-"

"And I might actually be vaguely inclined to believe you if I knew that Glinda and Fiyero are still alive."

"Oh, of course, of course! Believe me, Miss Glinda and the Captain are both in good health, and I'll be more than happy to show them to you… er, once you and I have had time to discuss-"

"Now."

"I'm sorry?"

Elphaba took a deep breath. "Your Ozness," she said through gritted teeth, "The only friends I have left in the world are currently in prison; the last I saw Fiyero, he'd been shot several times in the legs and was just about to bleed to death; the last I heard of Glinda, one of her fingers had been cut off. I had to abandon my own sister for the second time in my life just to surrender to you, and I did so for exactly one reason: to make sure Fiyero and Glinda are alive and safe. I didn't do it for the sake of my health, I didn't do it to claim the post of vizier, I didn't do it because I was tired of living out in the wastes, and I definitely didn't do it for _you._ So, if you want to discuss anything to do with your personal agenda or my professional future or whatever you brought me here to discuss, you'll give me proof that my friends are alive, or this conversation is over."

"Elphaba-"

" _Now."_

The Wizard sighed, and made a frantic gesture to one of the guards flanking him. There was a muffled whispering somewhere just outside the room, followed by the sound of marching footsteps hastily proceeding down the corridor; perhaps five minutes later, the door on the Wizard's half of the cell swung open, and Fiyero and Glinda were led in, each of them manacled, gagged, and flanked by a duo of massive-but-probably-superfluous guards.

Immediately, Elphaba found herself struck by a powerful combination of elation and shock: as happy as she was to see them, the sight alone was nothing short of disheartening, for the two of them looked so unlike their normal selves it felt more like looking at complete strangers. Pale, gaunt, and hunched under the weight of their shackles, Fiyero and Glinda were clearly a little worse for the wear after over a month in captivity, and the rough prison garments only made them look even more fundamentally _crushed._ And yet, apart from the fact that Fiyero was now limping so badly that he needed to be held upright by the guards (presumably because of the near-fatal shooting), neither of them were injured.

And more to the point, Glinda was in possession of a full complement of fingers.

The moment the two prisoners saw Elphaba, their eyes widened with shock. In spite of herself, Glinda let out a squeak and tried to remove her gag – perhaps to say hello, perhaps to plead for help, perhaps simply to vent – whatever the case, the guards stopped her before she could get a grip on the cloth. Fiyero, on the other hand, could only look on despairingly. No doubt he was thinking of all the sacrifices he'd made to keep Elphaba out of the Wizard's hands – only for her to be captured anyway. Elphaba herself could only offer a reassuring smile, trying not to let her own despair show.

"You see?" said the Wizard, offering a broad and slightly desperate smile. "Totally unharmed. Well, apart from Captain Tiggular's legs, but the doctors assure me that he will be able to walk again in a few months."

"Oh very clever," Elphaba sighed. "You managed to get me to surrender by sending someone _else's_ finger in the mail. Do you feel like explaining which unlucky girl had to get her metacarpals clipped just to trick me into giving myself up?"

If nothing else, the Wizard at least had the decency to look embarrassed. "Erm… I didn't ask. Madame Morrible was the one who found the… donor, you see. As I understand it, she keeps lists of potential sources of human tissues for her potions: hospitals, morgues, graveyards, execution sites, and prisons much like this one. All I know is that I told Morrible we needed a finger, and she was able to provide one within a matter of hours."

"And the two of you knew full well that I'd be too panicked to check to see if the finger actually belonged to Glinda. Well done. Congratulations. I'd applaud, but my hands are tied down, so I suppose we'll just have to settle for a ringing silence."

"This wasn't done out of deviousness or anything of that sort," said the Wizard – and was it Elphaba's imagination, or did he sound just a tiny bit defensive? "When you didn't reply to any of my letters, Madame Morrible was determined to use the real Glinda's fingers to motivate you into surrendering, but I forbade it. After all, Glinda still has the support of the Ozian public; they think you bewitched her into cooperating with you, and I doubt they'd be happy if news broke out of any… mutilation on our part."

"Didn't stop you from having them dragged around in shackles, did it?"

"Security precautions in this wing of the prison are at their strictest, I'm afraid. I assure you, both Glinda and Fiyero are being given the best of all possible care – just as it was in the photographs I sent. Once this is over and done with, they'll be moved to house arrest until such time as we can repair their reputations. You have my word."

There was an awkward pause, broken at last by a loud cough from the Wizard. "I trust I've proved my good intentions," he continued, sounding almost exasperated by now. "Now, could we _please_ get back to the matter that I was going to discuss?"

"If we must."

The Wizard murmured another command to the guards, who immediately began shepherding Fiyero and Glinda out of the cell. Then, to Elphaba's confusion, the guards were also dismissed, leaving them alone in the room.

 _Just how confidential is this supposed to be?_ She wondered. _These guards have to be the Wizard's most trusted men, otherwise they wouldn't be allowed to look at him unmasked much less stand in his presence. So what doesn't he want them hearing? What could possibly be so earthshattering that even the pinnacle of the elite can't be trusted with it?_

For almost a minute, silence reigned in the cell as the footsteps of the guards gradually faded away, the echoes of slamming gates slowly died, and even the distant hubbub of the prison seemed to dampen slightly. It wasn't until the last footfall had dwindled into the distance that the Wizard finally made his move:

Reaching into one of the innumerable pockets of his coat, he held out a familiar-looking green bottle, and placed it on the desk in front of him.

"We recovered this from your belongings during the attack on the governor's mansion," he explained.

For her part, Elphaba could only look from the Wizard to the little green bottle sitting on his desk. Once upon a time, she would have been infuriated to see the old bastard toying around with her personal possessions; she might have even made a grab for it, even with her arms strapped down and over twenty tons of metal bars in the way. But after the events of the last day or two, she was too tired and too emotionally exhausted to do anything more than stare balefully at the bottle's new owner.

"Glinda tells me it belonged to your mother," said the Wizard. "Is that right?"

Elphaba nodded wearily.

"Your mother's name was… Melena, yes?"

Once again, Elphaba nodded, this time with just the tiniest bit of curiosity. _Where are you going with this, old man?_ She silently wondered.

And then, to her surprise, the Wizard drew _another_ little green bottle from his coat pocket and placed it on the desk as well.

"This was once my product," he explained. "You see, back when I'd first arrived in Oz, long before I took the throne… I was a salesman. People had already hailed me a wizard by then, but before certain "interested parties" decided they could bank on my newfound influence in the coup d'état they were planning, I still needed to make a living – one that wouldn't compromise any future profits I might earn as the Wizard. In the end, I decided to give up on the illusionist gig for the time being and find work in a place where my face wasn't as widely-known as it was in cities, namely Munchkinland: I bought a caravan, tracked down a few ingredients, cobbled together a distillery, and went to work producing… this."

He held up the bottle. "Green Elixir. Marketed as a cure for just about anything from measles to hair loss, touted as the key to a richer, healthier, happier life for anyone lucky enough to buy a consignment from yours truly. Of course, it was really just cheap booze flavoured with a few eye-catching alchemical compounds: intoxicating, but totally useless at curing anything other than sobriety, and hardly unique in a local market hopelessly oversaturated with other brands of bogus cure-all. Really, the only thing that kept my Elixir from being ignored by my customers was the _**colour**_ of the stuff – that special shade of emerald that I only achieved through ingredients you'd rarely found outside of alchemists' laboratories. The _**green**_ , you see…"

Somewhere at the back of Elphaba's mind, a hidden piece of the puzzle slotted into place, and her eyes widened in astonishment. Suddenly, she had a very good idea of what the Wizard was about to tell her, and though the embers of her rage flared violently at the merest thought of it, the conclusion only became all the more obvious for every second that passed.

"My business was successful for a time," the Wizard continued. "Modestly successful, at any rate. But eventually, I started receiving letters from those "interested parties" I told you about and… well, once I realized I was being catapulted into high office, I lost interest in the moneymaking side of the business and I fell back into one of my old habits: I started sleeping around. I looked for homes where the husbands were frequently absent and the wives were lonely and frustrated; once I was sure that the old man was out on business, I introduced myself to the lady of the house." The Wizard smiled ruefully. "A handsome stranger with a winning smile and a silver tongue showing up unannounced on a cold and lonely evening? The reception was positive, Elphaba. _Very_ positive. And then…"

He sighed. "And then… I met Melena Thropp."

By now, Elphaba's eyes were half-lidded again, fixed on the table in front of her. The shock had already faded, replaced with the same dull sense of exhaustion she'd felt ever since she'd arrived in prison… but even if she hadn't been emotionally wearied and fatigued beyond endurance, she wouldn't have been able to muster much astonishment at the Wizard's confession. After all, she could already tell how this story was going to end, and the inevitability of it only became more deadening the closer the ending got.

Meanwhile, the Wizard's carefully-spun narrative was starting to unravel: he was speaking faster now, his voice beginning to tremble, his tone distraught. "She was… her husband was away on affairs of state, something to do with the Assembly, and Melena was scarcely bothering to pretend she didn't hate him by that point, so... it didn't take long for her to open up to me. I don't know how long I spent there, probably the whole evening come to think of it, but I know for a fact that we went through quite a bit of Green Elixir while I was there. We got drunk, we made love, we drank some more… and then we parted ways. She went back to being the dutiful wife to Frexspar Thropp, and I took a train northwest to Gillikin, where I rendezvoused with my contacts among the "interested parties." A few months later, the last remnants of the royal dynasty of Ozma collapsed in on itself, and with the entire populace of Oz crying out for guidance, the Wizard was just the man to give it to them. And bit by bit, I almost completely forgot about Melena… up until a month ago, when I found that bottle among your things: I never imagined she'd keep a souvenir of our time together, much less that she and I actually… that I had a… I mean, I didn't think that…"

Suddenly, he seemed to be fighting back tears. _"I didn't know,"_ he said. "You have to believe me, Elphaba: I didn't know your mother was pregnant when I left her… and I swear I didn't know who you really were when I declared you an enemy of the state. You have to believe me. I know it sounds insane, and I know it's not what you want to hear after all the time we spent at each other's throats, but… you're my child, Elphaba. _You're my daughter."_

So that was it. _That_ was the story the Wizard had wanted to get off his chest, his grand confession told from beginning to end, and the conclusion was every bit as predictable as Elphaba had feared it would be. And the sad thing was, there was a time when she would have yearned for a moment like: back before she'd become the Wicked Witch of the West, back when she was still in her early days at Shiz, Elphaba would have been overjoyed to discover that the Wizard was her father, would have gladly declared her allegiance in pursuit of the love and recognition that Frexspar had denied her for so long; she might have even forced herself to overlook the crimes against Animals if it had meant being a daughter to the most powerful man in all of Oz and sharing in the love of his subjects. Now, though…

Now, looking ahead at the man sitting on the other side of the bars, she didn't see the Wizard, the saviour of Oz.

She didn't see a father figure, desperate to atone for past mistakes and grand her all he felt was her due.

She didn't even see a dictator risen to power through fraudulence and corruption.

All she saw was a man – a petty, small-minded little man who'd gotten _everything_ he'd ever wanted without even trying, coasting through life on trickery and the greed of more ambitious men. She couldn't hate such a man, not really, nor could she love him, or even pity him.

She couldn't feel _anything_ for him.

"I'd like to be taken back to my cell, please," she said quietly.

The Wizard blinked in astonishment. "You what?"

"I've heard enough, there's nothing more to say, and I want to go back to my cell."

"But… but…" The Wizard floundered wildly. " _You're my daughter!"_ he exploded. "Don't you understand that, Elphaba? You – are – my – blood!"

"I understand it perfectly. And I'm also your prisoner, and now that you've said everything that needed to be said, it's time for you to send me back to my cell to await proper sentencing."

"No it isn't! I'm getting you out of here, Elphaba: as soon as I can get it cleared, I'm moving you to better quarters; once you've done a little time in protective custody under better conditions, you can be reintroduced to the people of Oz as a rehabilitated individual! You can have the position you always wanted, Elphaba! I know we've had our differences, and I know I haven't been a good father to you, but I want to prove to you that I can be a better man: with a little time, we can heal this countries wounds, and I can be a true father to you – the father you always wanted! Imagine it: Oz's greatest team, the Wizard and his beloved Vizier! Isn't that what you wanted?"

"But I _can't_ want it anymore," Elphaba replied. "And even if I did, I've long since gotten used to the fact that people like me don't get what we want. We just… lie in the ashes of our failures and watch as someone else claims the prize. But then, you'd know all about that, wouldn't you, _Your Ozness?"_

The Wizard recoiled, as if physically stung. "Please don't call me that," he pleaded – almost begging, really. "I'm your father, Elphaba-"

"You know what you are?" Elphaba asked, her voice deathly quiet. "You're the man who took advantage of a lonely woman, got her drunk on alchemically-enhanced booze and left her pregnant with a monster, then walked away without even sparing a thought for her. You're the man who was ruling Oz while my mother was being fed milkflowers in the hope that the next baby didn't turn out green… and you're the man who forgot all about my mother, even while she was dying in childbirth. You're the man who was aiming to treat every citizen of Oz as son or daughter, even while your own daughter grew up a freak and your stepdaughter grew up crippled."

"I don't-"

" _Remember Nessarose?_ Or do you think you shouldn't feel responsible for what happened to her as well? And that wasn't the first time you ruined her life, either: remember all those rumours you planted about me? She ended up tainted by my bad publicity, and you never once bothered to set the record straight – even though she was one of your regional governors, even though she never harmed you in any way."

"Elphaba, I'm trying to-"

"And another thing, Your Ozness: you're not just the man who coasted to universal popularity on a wave of hate, bigotry and lies. You're the man who's won everything. Your hold on the throne is secure, the Animals are caged or on the run, all dissenting voices have been silenced, and after a month-long hunt… you finally have the Wicked Witch of the West in captivity. Quite a coup, I imagine. Only now you want something more: you don't just want political victories. You want a family. Maybe you really do want to be a good father to me, or maybe you just want to see if you can use our connection to indoctrinate me – I don't know, and frankly I don't care. I don't care much about anything these days. One way or the other, I want you to know this…

"I have lost _everything._ My campaign for Animal rights came to nothing, my friends have been jailed and crippled for life because of me, and I was forced to abandon my own sister because of another clever little ruse on your part… and that's just the beginning. Do you know what it's like, watching your sister go mad and not being able to stop it? Do you know what it's like to watch another human suffering and realizing that all the power you have can't do a damn thing to prevent it? Well, that is what's been happening during my time in exile. And now you come along, expecting to win again just by shedding a few tears and a little belated paternal care. Well, Your Ozness, however this ends, I want you to feel just a tiny bit of the loss I've felt. Because, for once in your time in Oz… _it's not going to be easy for you."_

She took a deep breath.

"Now return to me my cell – before I say something hostile."

* * *

A/N: What next, ladies and gentlemen? Feel free to leave me your theories and reviews!


	8. Crisis

A/N: (long, drawn-out scream of frustration)

Back at last, ladies and gents! Sorry for the delay, but work, stress and unexpected developments have kept me away from this story for a while. I can only beg your forgiveness, and try to make up for lost time, and offer my thanks for everyone who viewed, reviewed, favourited and followed.

Anyway, without further ado, the latest chapter: read, review, and above all, enjoy!

Disclaimer: Wicked ain't mine. Shocking, I admit.

* * *

Days dragged by, one hour bleeding into the next and the next after that. Totally divorced from the usual pattern of sunrise and sunset as she was, Elphaba once again had no idea just how much time passed: even the familiar procession of meals, exercise periods, routine check-ups from the prison doctor and sessions with the barber began to blur together after a while, until it was impossible to guess at just how long she remained in captivity. It could have been a week, or it could have been three months; she'd no way of guessing which was closer to the truth. This time, though, there was no urgency forcing Elphaba to keep an eye on the clock: what would be the point?

This time around, she hadn't just lost: she'd hit rock bottom. Now she knew for a fact that she was effectively useless, and always had been. Fiyero and Glinda weren't in danger and never had been, Nessa was powerful enough to look out for herself, and the last thing Boq needed was any more of Elphaba's "help." And on top of all that, she had the Wizard's revelation weighing down on her. That was the one thing that just about pushed her over the edge: it was one thing to know she was useless; it was another thing altogether to know that she was completely _pointless_.

In hindsight, it was no wonder that her father ( _Frexspar,_ she reminded herself furiously) had despised her. Perhaps he'd had an inkling that his wife had been unfaithful, that his firstborn daughter wasn't his child at all, but he'd never been able to voice it except through blistering vitriol. And what about Nessarose? Weren't half-siblings and bastards always the cause of misfortune and sorrow, cuckoos usurping the proverbial nest in every story she'd heard in childhood? Gods only knew Elphaba had made Nessa's life a misery. The Wizard had destroyed the family, but only because Elphaba, his daughter, his _bastard_ had been there to guarantee its utter ruination: mother's death, Nessa's crippling, Frexspar's heart attack, Nessa's isolation and gradual descent into madness – all brought about through the graceless stupidity of the Wizard's illegitimate offspring.

And what a spectacular comedy she'd pulled off in trying to fight for Animal Rights! The Wizard's daughter trying to atone for the sins of the father! What good could she have possibly have done, a born failure like her, when she couldn't even keep her own family intact? No wonder half the Animals she'd rescued had ended up being recaptured or killed! She might as well have murdered them herself, she'd screwed up so badly.

From beginning to end, she'd been the Wizard's daughter, bringing with her just as much misery and destruction as her father had brought to Oz. Perhaps even more so, in fact: at least the Wizard hadn't gotten his only friends arrested – though admittedly that was only because the old bastard didn't _have_ friends.

So what reason did Elphaba have to care anymore? What bother caring about little things like time when she knew that there was no point in worrying about _anything?_ After all, even if she could somehow break out of this cell, what could she possibly do? Now that she was captive, Glinda and Fiyero were being patched up and due to be redeemed in the eyes of the public, there probably weren't any Animals left to rescue, and the less help Nessa and Boq had from _her,_ the better.

The world could get on just fine without her.

Unfortunately, Madame Morrible had other ideas.

* * *

After what felt like months of solitude in the holding cell, Elphaba awoke one morning to the sound of the door being wrenched open; moments later, Morrible had been furiously shaking her out of bed, muttering extremely unladylike remarks under her breath.

"Wake up!"

"Mmmwhaaayaaawant?" Elphaba yawned sleepily.

"Does it matter? I want you out of bed this very instant!"

"Or what? You'll have my show trial moved to an earlier date? Sweet Lurline, preserve my soul."

"This is _important,_ Miss Elphaba! All of Oz could depend on your cooperativation! The Wizard is counting on you for support!"

Elphaba offered her most poisonous-looking smirk. "Let me guess," she sneered. "The dictator needs moral support from his favourite bastard. My heart bleeds for him. I mean, what kind of a world do we live in now where self-deifying despots can't even carry out the worst of their atrocities without having their abandoned children around to hold their hands?"

"Miss Elphaba," Morrible snarled through gritted teeth, "I _tolerated_ your mercurious attitude at Shiz. I _expected_ it after you rebelled. Now that you are a captive of the Wizard, I have neither the time nor the patience for your iconoclastiferous behaviour, and even less now that a state of emergency has been declared. Now get out of bed before I do something violent!"

"…a state of emergency?"

"We are under attack! We've been attacked on several different fronts by persons or person unknown, and you are only person who might be able to assistify us in this dark hour! Does that sound like a task worthy of your lofty skills, Miss Elphaba, or do you need an hour with your two friends to stiffen your resolve? Oh, and another thing: need I remind you that if this newest threat makes it as far as the palace, _their_ lives will be in danger as well?"

Sighing, Elphaba rose from her bed. By now, she had so little faith in her own abilities, she was sorely tempted to recommend literally anyone else for the role of aiding Oz in this "dark hour" – assuming of course that Morrible wasn't lying through her teeth all over again… but concern for Fiyero and Glinda – combined with a few ragged shreds of conscience her apathy hadn't quite managed to sweep away – eventually forced her to comply. So, she let the guards handcuff her and lead her through the cellblock.

Once again, Elphaba found herself whisked down another rabbit's warren of corridors and passageways. This time, though, the atmosphere had changed: suddenly, there seemed to be a great many panicked-looking soldiers heading in the opposite direction, many of them hauling crates of heavy ordnance. Much to Elphaba surprise, few of them were surprised to see her marching past them, and even fewer of them spared her a second glance.

 _I'm yesterday's news,_ she thought bemusedly. _Displaced by the newest threat to Oz. Good grief, am I actually feeling wounded pride right now?_

Of course, more important questions occurred to her in the meantime: what could possibly have happened in the last few weeks that would have gotten these people so worried? Just who or what was behind this state of emergency?

Somewhere in the back of Elphaba's mind, a faint but worrying possibility rippled across her brain. So far, Morrible hadn't explained much about this ongoing crisis – in fact, she hadn't explained anything at all, and had actually forbidden questions on the subject as they continued through the passageways; however, she hadn't specified if this ongoing crisis was due to an invasion, a natural disaster, a plague, terrorist activity, or some kind of uprising. However, the fact that they were demanding that Elphaba assist in the matter pointed to one or two very worrying ideas: assuming she hadn't misread the situation completely and Oz was actually at war with a foreign power (or plague-ridden or devastated by an earthquake), perhaps there were still a few Animals with enough brainpower to start a revolution somewhere in the country. And if not an uprising, then maybe, _just maybe_ ….

The thought was too awful to countenance.

In the end, she was forced to admit that she couldn't afford to make unfounded guesses, not until she had all the facts on her side. Instead, Elphaba did her best to force the matter to the back of her mind as the guards escorted her out of the warrens and into the narrow, gunmetal-grey halls of what appeared to be a military complex, once again crowded by anxious-looking soldiers being redeployed to defensive positions. From there, it was a long journey upwards, and none of it was elevator-assisted. Eventually, however, the spartan passageways connecting barracks and armouries gave way to richly-carpeted hallways lined with oil paintings of constipated-looking generals, until at last the path ahead opened up into vast, shadowy room.

Elphaba had never seen a room like this before, but by now she'd read enough books to recognize the clichés on sight: the subdued lighting disrupted by harsh desk lamps, the worried-looking groups of officials, the colossal table complete with maps and models representing troop movements… this could only be a war room.

As expected, the Wizard was standing at the head of the table. If anything, he looked even more haggard this time around: he'd clearly lost a lot of weight in the last few weeks, and his eyes were haloed with dark, bruised-looking rings; as Elphaba was led closer, she could see his hands shaking compulsively as he gripped the edge of the table… and perhaps it was just the stark lighting around the maps, but he actually looked as though he'd aged quite dramatically since Elphaba had last seen him.

He glanced up as Elphaba entered, his expression briefly registering something akin to relief. "Oh, good," he muttered. "You're here. Um, I know your opinion towards me probably hasn't changed much in the six months since we spoke, but-"

"I'm not interested in your assessments, _Your Ozness_ ," Elphaba snapped. "According to Morrible, you wanted my assistance with matters concerning a state of emergency: _get on with it."_

At this, several officials watching from the sidelines gasped in horror, and one of the guards actually drew a truncheon from his belt and almost got within striking distance of Elphaba before the Wizard ordered him to stand down. Eventually, after a lot of squabbling from the assorted delegates around the room, Elphaba was ushered over to the war table and asked to examine the map of Oz – which was now pockmarked with dozens of red markers, most of them situated around the borders of the country.

"I assume these are the affected areas," Elphaba muttered dryly. "Trouble is, Morrible's been extremely tight-lipped about what this particular crisis is: what exactly are you up against?"

"We don't know."

"Oh come on, you've got to give me more to go on than that. Is it a plague, a natural disaster, an invasion? A series of terrorist attacks? Some kind of uprising? _What is it?"_

"We don't know," the Wizard sighed. "I think we can rule out the first two, though. It's too obviously targeted to be natural. Whatever's been happening out there, it's magical."

"Quite obviousively so," said Morrible. "The magic-detecting talismans of our militia all confirm it."

"Then why haven't you just gathered up this little militia of yours and found the culprit? You certainly had _me_ convinced that this mob couldn't be stopped. I mean, with the ability to sense magic and communicate by thought alone, coordinating an arrest – or a lynching – should have been easy!"

"Unfortunately, whoever or whatever is doing this remains too elusive to be caught. The attacks are over in a matter of seconds, and nobody sees or hears anything apart from the alarm signals transmitted by the talismans. Even my attempts at killing our mysterious insurgiators ended in failure: the only casualties of the intended counterattack were our own guardsmen and a few citizens."

"But what's actually been happening? How did this even begin?"

"A month and a half after you were arrested, Miss Elphaba, a private residence in upper Gillikin exploded – no deaths, fortunately, but it left the Wizard's finance minister effectively homeless; twelve days later, a convoy transporting vital documents through the Vinkus was destroyed, almost killing the crew in the process; the following week, an experimental airship project in Quadling Country was annihilated, killing a dozen workers in the process; fourteen days later, a number of homesteads in Munchkinland were effectively depopulated, eliminating some of the Wizard's most loyal and influentializing followers in the region."

Against all expectations, a look of disgust crossed Morrible's face. "As it turned out, they'd been transformed into livestock. Unfortunately, we didn't learn this until _after_ most of them had been slaughtered and eaten. And that was just the beginning. By your third month in captivity, a pattern was established, and every ten days since then, there's been another attack: homes destroyed, machines sabotaged, ministers assassinated, grassfires in the Vinkus, and every day the spread of the attacks gets a little closer to the Emerald City… and so far, nobody has been able to figure out a way of stopping it."

"That'd be bad enough," said the Wizard. "But we still haven't been able to work out exactly who or what caused this: Morrible and the few magical experts we've been able to gather have studied the evidence over and over again, but we still haven't been able to learn anything conclusive. No demands have been made yet, so we've been forced to rule out terrorist attacks until further notice; the same goes for potential uprisings and rebels. After that, the next most likely candidate would be a foreign power, but every single nation beyond our borders has denied responsibility: Ev, Ix, the Nome Kingdom, Noland and all the other major powers beyond the deserts are declaring their innocence… and strange as it seems, just about every expert I have seems inclined to agree with them. The targets are all wrong, apparently: whoever's doing this, they've avoided vital infrastructure, military bases, agriculture, anything that'd usually be singled out during any conventional incursion. If anything, they've mainly been attacking citizens, property, government officials. Besides, most of the foreign powers who would have the magical power to organize this kind of assault don't have any good cause to pick a fight with us. As for the Nome King, he's been standoffish with us, but this sort of thing just isn't his style; if he had the power to attack us without repercussion, he'd be aiming straight for the mines and then the capital with the intent of killing everyone in the region, not pussyfooting around on the border. So, either we're dealing with rogue elements from a foreign government… or we're dealing with something we've never encountered before. And the trouble with that last possibility is that we still can't figure out of it's the work of magical practitioners operating abroad, or being arranged by a magician at work right under our noses. All we have to go on, other than a few bits and pieces of disconnected evidence, was a message they left on the wall of a train station in Gillikin."

He handed her a photograph: visible plainly on the brick wall, just past the craters and scorch-marks marring its surface, were the words _**"NO-ONE WEEPS FOR THIEVES AND COWARDS"**_ daubed in luminous red ink.

Elphaba thought for a moment.

 _Six months_ , she mused silently. _Whoever's terrorising the country, they've done in six months what I couldn't accomplish in over two years of campaigning: they've got the Wizard on the run._

Against all expectations, she was almost getting interested in the problem at hand; that worrying possibility was still hovering at the forefront of her mind, but it didn't seem to have come to pass just yet. For the moment, the situation didn't seem as dire as she feared, so she decided to play along for now.

"What do you want me to do?" she said at last. "Is this going to be a matter of isolating the source of these attacks, or do you actually want me to combat the threat personally?"

"I'd be grateful for any assistance you can render," the Wizard replied. "I know you're capable of magical feats beyond any of our experts."

Behind the Wizard's back, Morrible bristled in indignation.

"By now, I know for a fact that you're a learned scholar of magic as well: you'd be capable of scholarly analysis or combat supremacy-"

"Under strict supervision," Morrible added.

"Whatever you do for us," continued the Wizard, "you'll be richly rewarded for it: I'd be able to guarantee you comfortable habitation with Fiyero and Glinda, repeal the anti-Animal laws given time and suitable excuses, and even arrange for political amnesty for your sister if we can find her. And, if you're able to ensure that the threat is eliminated... well, there's no reason why I can't reintroduce you to the public as a rehabilitated witch."

For the longest time, Elphaba considered telling the old man to ram every last one of his offers down his deepest, darkest crevices with the aid of a hammer and chisel.

Eventually, she decided against it: quite apart from the fact that this incident had piqued her curiosity, there were personal concerns she needed to assuage in the meantime. Besides, the offer of being imprisoned with Fiyero and Glinda was a lot more attractive than she was prepared to admit, for as much as she'd tried to be content with her isolated sentence, the loneliness had been starting to get to her.

"Alright," she said at last. "Bring me the evidence, and I'll see what I can learn."

* * *

As it turned out, apart from the mortuary snapshot and lurid crime scene photographs, most of the evidence consisted of only miscellaneous junk: a few handfuls of earth, a patch of dead grass, bundles of twigs, a few oddly-shaped pebbles, some jars of strange pink fluid, and other things scavenged from the devastation. However, as Elphaba quickly discovered, all of it was _saturated_ with magic: in some cases, it was debris from magical bombardment, items that had been exposed to so much thaumaturgical energy that they'd picked up some of its signature; others were clearly the remains of magical artefacts – ones that had clearly been used as murder weapons.

Nonetheless, Elphaba was allowed free reign to examine it, with Morrible remaining by her side as her supervisor and (grudgingly) assistant, while the Wizard and his assorted toadies looked on from the opposite end of the room, watching nervously as the evidence was dissected in detail.

"This was cursed," Elphaba explained, holding up one of the smaller pebbles. "Enchanted to kill everyone within a ten-foot radius the moment it hit the ground."

Several of the Wizard's retinue quailed and backed away as Elphaba idly tossed the pebble from hand to hand, clearly unaware that the enchantment had burned itself out as soon as its task had been completed – not that Elphaba felt any overwhelming desire to enlighten them.

By sharp contrast, Morrible looked deeply unimpressed. "I'd gathered that much already, Miss Elphaba," she said haughtily.

"Where was this thing found, though?"

"In the drawing room of Varticulam, the Wizard's minister for national defence. According to investigators, it must have been thrown through a window just as the minister was ushering his guests into the room."

"And what about these glass shards? This was part of a magical firebomb-"

"Dropped down a chimney and used to incineratify designs and plans at one of the Wizard's private workshops."

"And this brass spiral… according to the label, this was found in one of the homesteads in Munchkinland, so I have to assume that this was the frame that held the transmogrifying draught. Have all the crimes been committed like this? With potions and charms?"

Morrible nodded. "All the evidence we've been able to gather so far suggests it. Incidentally, Miss Elphaba, you're not doing much to justify your presence here."

"Hmm. Whoever's doing this hasn't actually worked any violent magic: these were all enchanted well in advance of the actual crime. And unless someone's worked out a means of hiding themselves from these magic-detecting talismans of yours, they've obviously got a base somewhere well out of range of your detectors."

"So you think it really could be a foreign power, then? Or perhaps you've unwittiatingly ended up with a successor, someone clever enough to operate from a safe vantage point in foreign territory.

Elphaba thought for a moment. "Maybe so… but once again, there hasn't been any statement. Even _I_ took time to make myself heard in public. Whoever's doing this isn't interested in preaching a message to the people: they're doing this to frighten them. And judging by all the dead government officials, I'd say the people they're trying to frighten are right at the top of the proverbial ladder."

"Either the Wizard or someone close to him, then," Morrible concurred. "Perhaps this new witch waiting for the right moment to announce herself."

"Who says it's just one witch? Perhaps you're up against a group of insurgents – a magician to create the necessary equipment, and an agent to deliver the equipment into the field. And," Elphaba added, as she surveyed the samples of grass, "Someone to _teleport_ the agent into the field."

"What?"

"Look at the scorch marks, Morrible: this wasn't caused by fire, this was caused a teleport spell, just the ones I used back in the early days!"

"I take it you're referring to the extremely noisy ones accompanified with a great deal of fire and smoke? I seem to recall you almost ended up setting your dress on fire after one particularly ambitious conjuring."

"Well, they can be made quieter and subtler, but that's not the point. Point is, this is why nobody's detected anything until it was too late: the attacker was teleported into the area, threw a cursed item at the target and left, end of story. Teleport spells are easy to detect, but actual _arrivals_ are almost impossible to pick up unless you know what you're looking for, so as long as the caster remained outside the range of the detectors, the militiamen wouldn't have sensed the agent at all."

"Well done, Miss Elphaba. Unfortunately, there's a slight gap in your theory: if this is being conducted by a group, then how would the magician in charge of the group know when to teleport the troops back from the field? As you say, teleport spells are very easy to detect, and I can say with absolute confidence that nobody's left Oz by that method since you escaped the country."

Elphaba thought for a moment. "Maybe they didn't leave at all," she suggested. "Maybe they're still here in Oz, working to sabotage the country from within. Or perhaps they died in the attacks. This is just a thought, but… have there been any unusual casualties stemming from these attacks? Bodies you can't readily identify, things like that."

"Of course: the mutilations inherent these particular deaths left many of the deceased unrecognizative, and even with diagnostic spells, we can't always tell if the victims were supposed to be there. You can find some of them on the table." She pointed in the general direction of the evidence tray by way of explanation.

"You mean the photos?"

"If only that were the extent." Morrible reached over and held up one of the jars, allowing the pink fluid within to slosh unpleasantly against the glass. _"This_ was one of the deceased," she explained. "What little we could scoop up before the remains completely evaporatified."

For several seconds, Elphaba could only stare in disbelief at the jars arrayed on the tray. "They _melted?_ " she all but exploded.

"Quite horrifically so, I would imagine. Sadly, we've had no means of identifying them: diagnostic spells and the like can't actually tell us their names, only what they might have looked like before their features turned to strawberry gravy."

"But what could have caused this?"

"We've no idea. We've found puddles of them at every single crime scene since the very beginning – except for the most recent massacre in Nest Hardings."

 _Nest Hardings._

Once again, Elphaba felt that terrible possibility creeping closer and closer, accompanied by a growing sense of dread; as the sensation grew, however, an idea occurred to her. "Do we have medical reports on the casualties in that one?" she asked, trying to keep the nervousness from her voice.

Morrible wearily handed over the topmost folder. As expected, the photographs were especially grisly, many of them pockmarked beyond recognition; the method of attack in this case had been a devastating alchemical weapon that had mangled their faces and blistered their lungs to the point of ruination, the cause of death ultimately being asphyxia. In the end, Elphaba didn't have to look far to find what she was looking for, as it was only file marked with _cause of death: unknown._

More to the point, it was the only case where the victim didn't appear to have been touched by the supernaturally-enhanced chemicals at all, allowing Elphaba an unhindered view of his face.

 _Oh sweet Lurline._

The skin was more translucent than she remembered, and the medical examiner's report had him several inches taller than his usual height, but the face in the attached photograph was instantly recognizable to anyone that had known the unfortunate manservant.

"Boq," she whispered.

Morrible's brow wrinkled in confusion. "Who?"

"Boq – Munchkin boy, a little taller than average; he was one of my classmates back at Shiz. According to this, he was one of the victims."

"Well, I'm very sorry for your loss," and here, Morrible's tone verged on downright acerbic, "But I really don't see why exactly one Munchkin scholarship student could possibly be so important… unless you're implicatorizing he was a suicide bomber of some kind."

"He may have been involved, but that's not the point: there's too many inconsistencies here. For thing, the last time I saw Boq, he was missing both legs; according to the report, he was in possession of two very functional legs – no scarring, no signs of magical grafting, nothing to indicate he ever had anything other than four limbs."

A picture was forming, one that Elphaba wasn't sure she'd appreciate the sight of once it was complete, but she had to carry on. If she gave up now, the uncertainty would drive her insane: she had to know the answer, in only because it was on the tip of her tongue.

"And then there's the cause of death," she plunged on. "It says _unknown,_ but it's been confirmed he didn't die like the other victims of the attack. And what about all the liquefied victims you found – nobody else in the area was melted in those disasters, right? So what if… just supposing for the sake of argument…"

Elphaba hurried over to the nearest jar, and began casting diagnostic spells as quickly and thoroughly as she could, paying little attention to the bewildered mutters of the officials on the other side of the room. A moment later, the spell began pouring information into her brain, but she could already guess what the results would tell her long before that final line of information flickered into place.

" _This_ is Boq as well," she proclaimed, holding up the jar for Morrible's inspection.

"What."

"You heard me. Analytical spells confirm that this used to be a Munchkin of Boq's age, height, weight and overall appearance. Something tells me your forensic teams weren't exactly on speaking terms." She waved a hand over the next jar in line, hastily casting another diagnostic spell. "Same with this one… and this one… and this one… and this one… need I go on?"

Elphaba took a deep breath – more the sake of steadying herself for the precipice than anything else: the picture was complete now, and the awful possibility she'd dreaded had been confirmed as reality. Worst of all, she couldn't keep this to herself: now that she'd found the truth, she needed to make it clear for the watching officials that her worst nightmare had come true.

"Somehow," she said, "Boq has been at every single terrorist attack that took place in Oz since the crisis began, and he's died at every single one. Most obvious conclusion is that he was the triggerman… or rather, his _iterations_ were the triggermen. I think that Boqs that have died so far – melted or otherwise – aren't "real," for lack of a better term."

At this, Morrible's face twisted into a look of morbid fascination. "You believe these are alchemical copies, then? Magically-formulatoid duplicates of some kind?"

"It's the only answer that makes sense. When I last saw Boq, he was waiting for a new set of legs, generated via magic and alchemical processes; what if the process was altered to generate a whole _person_? It might explain why they've all melted up until now: the process wasn't yet perfected, so their bodies begin to break down once they're no longer sustained by magical processes. I mean, that was one of the problems we had back in the lab. Maybe the process has been perfected, maybe these duplicates are being animated through something from the Grimmerie this time around."

"But how would that be possible, Miss Elphaba? The only copy of the Grimmerie is in my possession, and has been ever since you surrendered it to us. Unless you're accusiating _me_ of being the culprit."

Elphaba sighed deeply. "No… but before I handed over the Grimmerie, someone was able to copy several passages from it without my knowledge – someone who's currently looking after the real Boq, someone with more than enough magical skill and knowledge to be dangerous if provoked, someone… who just so happens to be my sister."

Morrible's jaw dropped. "You mean… _Nessarose Thropp_ is the terrorist behind all this?"

"Who else could it be? The site of the last massacre was in Nest Hardings, just a few miles from the governor's mansion at Colwen Grounds; she might as well have signed her name, Morrible. Her manservant, her old territory, the experiments she was carrying out on Boq, the "additional samples" she was taking from him – it all ties together! She even has an effective motive: Nessa did everything in her power to keep me from leaving, and now that I'm in captivity, she's taking it out on all of Oz – so either she's trying to force you to give me up, or she thinks I'm dead and she's just out for revenge. I mean, you read that bit of graffiti: it's pretty clear that she thinks you "stole" me."

"But she doesn't even know any magic!"

"She does now: I spent an entire year teaching her. And after that, I spent weeks on end watching her slowly spiralling into insanity, hoping against hope that I might be able to help her recover… but I wasn't strong enough to make her better: I was only strong enough to make her _worse_. And now that she's learned everything she needs, now that she's run out of reasons to hold back…"

Elphaba smiled bitterly, blinking away tears.

"Now Nessa is exactly what you, the Wizard and the rest of Oz made her: the Wicked Witch of the East."

* * *

A/N: Any ideas what could happen next? Feel free to furnish me with your theories and opinions!


End file.
